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Show High blood pressure f can be treated We are hearing much these days about high blood pressure, pres-sure, known medically as hypertension. hy-pertension. For several years concerted national programs to discover and treat this most common of human ills have been under way, and the American Medical Medi-cal Association and others have kept up the educational push. What is blood pressure? A pamphlet from the AMA explains that your heart and blood vessels make up your body's blood distribution (circulatory) (cir-culatory) system, upon which all life processes depend. Under Un-der pressure, your blood carries car-ries food and oxygen to and removes waste products from every cell in your body. Blood pressure is maintained maintain-ed by your heart in your arteries, and blood is pumped through your lungs where it picks up a fresh supply of oxygen and eliminates carbon dioxide. It then flows to the left side of your heart and is ready for another trip through body. What causes high blood pressure? In most cases the answer is not known. In at least 90 per cent of the people with high blood pressure no underlying disorder can be found. These people are said to have "essential "es-sential hypertension." In the other 10 per cent, some of the causes are diseases of the kidneys, conditions affecting the adrenal glands atop each kidney, narrowing of the bo- dy's largest artery (aorta), defects in other arteries, and disorders of the nervous system, sys-tem, i Whatever its cause, untreated un-treated hypertension can do irreparable damage to vital body organs and result in early death. The heart is the organ most commonly damaged. dam-aged. The higher the pressure, pres-sure, the harder the heart must work. Hypertension also contributes to fatty deposits in the arterial walls (atherosclerosis). (atheros-clerosis). Thus the blood supply sup-ply to the heart will diminish. This change may result in chest pain on exercise (angi-( na) or even in serious injury to part of the heart muscle (myocardial infarction, or heart attack). How can you tell if you have high blood pressure? Unless you see your doctor, the chances are you can't. Hypertension usually is detected de-tected during a routine physical physi-cal examination. An estimated 23 million Americans have high blood pressure. Probably only half of them are aware of it. High blood pressure and hypertensive hyperten-sive heart disease cause thousands thou-sands of deaths annually, and contribute to strokes, heart attacks and kidney failure. High blood pressure can be treated successfully and kept under control in almost all cases. Drug therapy and alterations alter-ations in life style (quit smoking, smok-ing, control tension, watch your diet, exercise moderately) moderate-ly) can keep high blood pressure pres-sure from killing you. |