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Over the past 50 years there has been a significant shift in the ‘goal posts’ regarding the definition of hypertension. The old docs used to say that the top reading of blood pressure, known as the systolic pressure, should be 100 plus your age. Thus an 80year old person should have a systolic blood pressure of 180mmHg. It’s no wonder there was such a high rate of cerebral haemorrhage in those days!
For a number of years the scientific medical community then settled on a level of 140/90 or above, as hypertension. Over the past few years this has shifted even lower to hypertension now being considered at a level of 135/85 or above.
The reality is that as far as your blood pressure goes, the lower the better, as long as you don’t feel dizzy. We were all designed to be hunter-gatherers. Basically, we were supposed to wake up on the floor of the cave, pick up our spear and wander into the jungle to catch our food. Sometimes we bought food home, other times we went hungry. So, in our position at the top of the food chain, our rather monotonous lives were based around feast, famine and an awful lot of movement to obtain the reward of food in our bellies.
For the thousands of years we performed this behaviour, we had to evolve mechanisms to adjust to this way of living. As far as our blood pressure was concerned, this involved special mechanisms to keep our blood pressure at a level good enough to keep the blood flowing in our arteries during times of famine.
High blood pressure is a very common, major risk for all manner of cardiovascular diseases. It is caused by a number of genetic, metabolic and environmental factors but with an expert, integrated approach combining lifestyle, psycho-social and pharmaceutical interventions, the majority of cases will achieve close to ideal blood pressure control, thus negating this otherwise serious disorder.
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