When your doctor tells you that you have high blood pressure, this means that he has noticed that your arteries are resistant unusually strong to the flow of your blood. This increases blood pressure and disrupts the flow of blood to organs.
This poses a problem because, already, in a normal situation, our arteries
are exposed to such tremendous pressure that they keep crack and need to be repaired.
Imagine: if you pierce your forearm and make a small hole in your humeral artery, the one that supplies oxygenated blood in your arm, the jet that will come out could spray your ceiling! You will then have to press with all your strength on the hole, with your finger, to stop the bleeding!
And the same goes for the femoral arteries that supply your legs. This under conditions of normal blood pressure.
So it’s no wonder that arteries get damaged over time.
They may be made of several thick and muscular walls, to resist such pressure is not easy, especially with this heart that never stops beating – over 100,000 times a day!
Your blood pressure fluctuates all the time :
However, the spray that will come out of your arm, if you pierce it, will not be stable like that of a garden hose. It will go up and it will come down every time your heart beats.
When the heart contracts and sends blood through the body, it increases pressure in the arteries. When he relaxes, the pressure drops. This is why your doctor has to give you two numbers when measuring your blood pressure: the number when the heart contracts, and which is the highest. And the other, when the heart relaxes between two beats, and which is the lowest.
To wow the gallery, you can use the medical terms for these two phenomena: systolic pressure (high) and diastolic pressure (low). You will read on your analysis report for example 120/80 mmHg, which means a systolic pressure of 120 millimeters of mercury, and a diastolic pressure of 80 millimeters of mercury (Hg is the chemical symbol for mercury, because mercury is said in Latin hydrargyrus, in other words cash).
But this diastolic / systolic pressure is not stable either. It varies throughout the day, it rises when you get angry, as well as when you exert a physical effort. It can also go up when you are at your doctor’s checking your blood pressure and you are stressed because you are worried that he will find out you have high blood pressure! Therefore, several measurements at different times will be needed to confirm the diagnosis of high blood pressure.
This is considered “high” when it is continuously above 140/90 mmHg, even when you are sitting idle and feeling relaxed.
