Techniques For Avoiding High Blood Pressure
If you are concerned about your blood pressure getting too high, you will almost certainly go to your physician to seek advice. Your doctor will invariably want you to make some lifestyle changes or / and take medication if this does not have an effect. Making lifestyle alterations is the first tactic, but it does not always work. It normally does, but just not always.
However, it is vital to strive to reduce your blood pressure, also called hypertension, before you go on tablets. Lots of people are of the belief that once your body relies on medication to moderate its hypertension, you will never be able to wean yourself off the tablets. This is what my GP told me. Therefore, if it goes against your personal philosophy to take tablets, now is the time to do something about it.
The first thing to do is give up smoking and if you frequently drink too much alcohol, to cut back on that too, as both actions will have the effect of raising your blood pressure. Adopting these measures will also have knock-on effects for the rest of your body. You will get fitter in general by not smoking at all and not drinking very much.
The next thing to do is to raise your level of daily activity. Do you do any exercise at all? If not, you will be amazed at how much two thirty-minute sessions of light exercise will help. Walk for thirty minutes in the morning and evening or substitute one walk for thirty minutes gardening or swimming.
Diet is another manner of beating off the hypertension tablets. Salt, or sodium as it is frequently referred to, is a major cause of hypertension, mostly because it encourages water retention. So, cutting back on salt or following a sodium depleted diet can have a major effect on your blood pressure.
Try substituting something else for salt: more pepper, a mixture of some other herbs or simply leave it out altogether. After a couple of weeks you will not notice, except that everybody else’s cooking will taste really heavily over-salted! I did this quite successfully.
Add more fresh fruit and vegetables to your diet, because that will also reduce your hypertension. Eating less fat and red meat will also help. Stress is a main factor in hypertension, try to relax a bit more and possibly take up meditation or yoga.
If you are on medication, it is possible that the drugs are raising your blood pressure. If you think that this might be the case, take your drugs to the physician and ask his opinion. You may be able to replace some of them. Some of the drugs that can have an adverse effect are: oral contraceptives, steroids, anti-depressants and cold / flu medicines.
You will notice that many of these techniques for reducing your (possible) hypertension are related, so if you are an over-weight, inactive smoker who enjoys a drink, you can do a lot by remedying that and your pressure will fall and you will be healthier in other ways as well.
FDA Lifts Liver Warning on PAH Drug
Monthly liver function testing will no longer be required for patients taking the endothelin receptor antagonist ambrisentan (Letairis) for pulmonary arterial hypertension, the drug’s maker said.
The FDA has lifted a boxed warning requiring the testing, according to Gilead Sciences.
That move is unusual but not unprecedented, an FDA spokeswoman told MedPage Today.
Warnings have been removed in recent years in the cases of omeprazole (Prilosec), used to treat conditions caused by excess stomach acid, and fluticasone (Flovent), an inhaled corticosteroid, she said.
The step comes after the agency reviewed 7,800 patient-years of data, collected through the Letairis Education and Access Program, the Gilead statement said.
The data were “consistent with clinical trial data used to support the registration of Letairis,” the company said. During those 12-week controlled trials, liver function abnormalities were not seen in patients getting the drug, but were observed in 2.3% of those on placebo.
The drug remains on restricted distribution and can be obtained only through the company’s access program.
A boxed warning cautioning against the use of the medication in pregnancy, because of risk of birth defects, remains in force.
In postmarketing experience with the drug, elevations of liver aminotransferases have been reported, the company said, but in most cases “alternative causes of the liver injury could be identified.”
But the drug should be stopped if aminotransferase elevations greater than five times the upper limit of normal occur, if they are accompanied by bilirubin greater than twice the upper limit of normal, or if there are signs or symptoms of liver dysfunction and other causes are excluded, according to the company release.
Ambrisentan, taken once a day, improves exercise ability and delays clinical worsening in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension, the company said.
Blood Pressure Drugs May Help Heart Patients Without Hypertension
In people with heart disease, the use of blood pressure-lowering medications can be beneficial, even in those who don’t have high blood pressure, new research suggests.
The study found that when people without high blood pressure were given blood pressure drugs, their risk of congestive heart failure, stroke, all-cause mortality and a combination of cardiovascular disease outcomes were reduced.
“If someone has had a previous heart attack or other cardiovascular event, and their blood pressure is in the normal range, they’re still at risk of future cardiovascular events. There may be an additional benefit to giving an anti-hypertensive medication to these folks,” said study author Angela M. Thompson, a doctoral research fellow in the department of epidemiology at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.
“Current treatment recommendations advise treatment when the blood pressure is over 140/90 mm/Hg, but our study shows that you can obtain benefits even when the blood pressure is below that,” Thompson explained.
In fact, the risk for cardiovascular disease begins at 115 mm/Hg of systolic pressure (the top number on a blood pressure reading), according to background information in the study.
In addition, in adults 55 years and older, the lifetime risk of developing hypertension is more than 90 percent, the study noted.
The study, which was funded by Tulane University and the National Institutes of Health, was published in the March 2 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, according to background information in the study. About 54 percent of strokes and 46 percent of heart disease cases occur in people who have blood pressure levels in the normal range, the study reported.
The current study is a meta-analysis of 25 reports that were selected from a pool of 874 studies. The selected studies included almost 65,000 people without high blood pressure, and three-quarters of the study participants were men. All had a history of heart attack or other cardiovascular disease.
Most of the study volunteers were taking blood pressure medications known as beta blockers or angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, two commonly used classes of drugs for lowering blood pressure.
The researchers found that people taking blood pressure medications had a 23 percent reduced risk of stroke, a 29 percent reduced risk of congestive heart failure and a 15 percent reduction in the risk of a combination of cardiovascular events. In addition, the risk of cardiovascular mortality was reduced by 17 percent, and the risk of all-cause mortality dropped by 13 percent in those taking these medications compared to those who weren’t on the drugs.
Thompson said the researchers don’t know exactly how blood pressure medications lowered the risk of cardiovascular events, because this wasn’t a study designed to look at the mechanism behind the effect.
He and the other researchers reported no conflicts of interest.
Dr. Mario Garcia, chief of cardiology at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City, said the findings were “not surprising or unexpected. These drugs all have beneficial effects beyond lowering blood pressure. These drugs have already been shown to prevent events in patients with heart attacks or heart failure.”
Dr. Hector Ventura, director of cardiomyopathy and heart transplantation at the Ochsner Health System in New Orleans, said, “This study is kind of novel because they looked at people treated with blood pressure medications without hypertension. And, even in people without so-called hypertension, there might be a benefit from these medications,” he said.
But, he said, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. In some cases, these medications could make blood pressure too low. And, people would likely need to be on these medications indefinitely, possibly for years. So, costs and potential side effects have to be considered, said Ventura, who wrote an accompanying editorial in the same issue of the journal.
In the editorial, Ventura concluded that the meta-analysis “demonstrates that treatment of blood pressures lower than 140/90 mm/Hg is associated with benefits for patients with [cardiovascular disease], but more clinical trial data are needed for those without CVD.”
