Talk with your doctor about how to manage your blood pressure and whether medication might help. Primary hypertension is the most common type of high blood pressure and has no known cause. You can change some risk factors, such as unhealthy lifestyle habits. A healthy lifestyle can lower your risk for developing high blood pressure. Risk factors for hypertension are factors that increase a person’s chances of developing high blood pressure. They can be fixed or non-modifiable, like a family history or advancing age, or modifiable, like a sedentary lifestyle or excessive alcohol or salt consumption.
Prevalence of hypertension
Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Smoking can contribute to many life threatening conditions, including heart attack, stroke, lung disease, and several cancers. Getting too little physical exercise can negatively impact you in many ways. It could aggravate mental health conditions like anxiety and depression and lead to being overweight. Those changes include hormonal and physical shifts in your kidneys and how they function. Carrying too much weight could also alter how your body uses insulin.
- But for a growing number of kids, high blood pressure is due to lifestyle habits such as an unhealthy diet and lack of exercise.
- Talk with your doctor about how to best monitor your blood pressure during pregnancy.
- Hypertension (high blood pressure) is common, affecting over half of people in the United States over age 40.
- However, high blood pressure can have a big impact on your health, so it is important to understand what it is, what causes it, and how you can lower it.
- Risk factors for hypertension are factors that increase a person’s chances of developing high blood pressure.
The AHA recommends lower still — no more than 1,500 mg daily, especially if you have hypertension. Eating less sodium can help you lower your blood pressure. Sodium is a component of table salt, aka sodium chloride.
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- The AHA also acknowledges a possible link between drinking coffee and a lower risk of chronic illnesses, such as cancer and heart disease.
- It’s also a common addition to many packaged and processed foods to enhance taste.
- If you smoke, the AHA recommends quitting as soon as you can.
- Blood pressure naturally fluctuates throughout the day and can sometimes suddenly rise or “spike” due to certain causes, such as strong emotions or stress.
It’s also a common addition to many packaged and processed foods to enhance taste. Some other characteristics that you cannot control—such as your age, race, or ethnicity—can affect your risk for high blood pressure. Eating too much sodium—an element in table salt—increases blood pressure. Most of the sodium we eat comes from processed and restaurant foods.
Causes of High Blood Pressure
Nicotine raises blood pressure, and breathing in carbon monoxide—which is produced from smoking tobacco—reduces the amount of oxygen that your blood can carry. In addition to high blood pressure, having obesity can also lead to heart disease and diabetes. Talk to your health care team about a plan to reduce your weight to a healthy level. If you have high blood pressure or preeclampsia during pregnancy, it is very important to treat it. Your doctor can prescribe blood pressure medications that are safe for pregnant people. They also might recommend lifestyle changes such as regular activity and a healthy diet.
Tips to Manage Your Blood Pressure
Many people with this condition are sensitive to salt, so even eating a small amount can trigger a spike in blood pressure. Your care provider will likely recommend more-frequent readings if have high blood pressure or other risk factors for heart disease. Checking your blood pressure is the best way to start crypto mining know if you have high blood pressure. If hypertension isn’t treated, it can cause other health conditions like kidney disease, heart disease and stroke. Your arteries can get stiffer, causing blood pressure to go up.
Genes likely play some role in high blood pressure, heart disease, and other related conditions. However, it is also likely that people with a family history of high blood pressure share common environments and other potential factors that increase their risk. Essential hypertension has been linked to certain risk factors in your diet and lifestyle. For example, eating a lot of salt can cause your blood pressure to rise.
Several lifestyle habits or behaviors make a person more vulnerable to developing hypertension. High blood pressure is more common in Black adults than in White, Hispanic, or Asian adults. Compared with other racial or ethnic groups, Black people tend to have higher average blood pressure numbers and get high blood pressure earlier in life.
Lowering your blood pressure even a small amount can help reduce your risk of these problems. Use our check your blood pressure reading tool to see your reading on a chart and understand what it means. High blood pressure is very common, especially in older adults. There are usually no symptoms, so you may not realise you have it. Some people might also need medication to control their blood pressure. Sometimes, hypertension suddenly appears or gets worse during pregnancy.
High Blood Pressure Causes and Risk Factors
The number of adults with hypertension increased from 650 million in 1990 to 1.4 billion in 2024, with the increase seen largely in low- and middle-income countries. This increase is due mainly to a rise in the number of older adults in those countries. Very high blood pressures can cause headaches, blurred vision, chest pain and other symptoms. The only way to know is to get your blood pressure checked.
If you’re age 40 or older, or you’re 18 to 39 with a high risk of high blood pressure, ask for a blood pressure check every year. Blood pressure screening is an important part of general health care. How often you should get your blood pressure checked depends on your age and overall health. Starting an antihypertensive medication is an individualized decision, one that should be carefully discussed with your prescribing healthcare provider. Talk with a healthcare provider before starting a new exercise regimen to ensure optimal health benefits and personal safety. A hypertensive emergency is when a sudden and extreme rise in blood pressure damages one or more vital organs, namely the eyes, brain, kidney, or heart.
When hypertension develops after 20 weeks of pregnancy, it is called preeclampsia. The top number of the reading is called the systolic pressure, and the bottom number is called the diastolic pressure. The systolic number measures your blood pressure at the exact moment your heart beats. Meanwhile, the diastolic number measures your blood pressure between each heartbeat.
