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Pharmacy Links

MEASURES TO BE TAKEN FOR HYPERTENSION PREVENTION

23rd April 2009

• Simply slowing down the pace of one’s life can help prevent hypertension. According to one US expert, people who talk fast tend to have high blood pressure. ‘Such people don’t put commas into their sentences’ he claims. As a result they breathe poorly and this also contributes to their high blood pressure. This researcher uses a piece of equipment that can measure blood pressure very accurately during talking and other routine social interactions. He found that virtually everyone’s blood pressure goes up (by about 10-15 per cent) when speaking. Hypertensives, however, are more reactive-the higher a person’s blood pressure when quiet, the more it goes up when speaking. This statement is based on a study of 2,000 people from the cradle to old age. The researcher teaches people to speak more slowly and to put commas back into their sentences. Just using this method alone he has had formidable success in curing hypertension without drugs.

• Take your blood pressure every day. It used to be thought that people taking their own blood pressure would be made anxious or neurotic about it but twenty years of clinical experience shows that this is not the case. Rather, research has found that people get reassurance from measuring their own blood pressure. This may account, at least in part, for the positive results achieved by people monitoring their own levels.

A study in Seattle asked sixty hypertensive people to measure their own blood pressure at home twice a day for a month. At the end of the month there were significant reductions in blood pressure (10 points or more) in 43 per cent of the sixty. Clearly the actual taking of the blood pressure had acted as a sort of simple biofeedback mechanism.

• Getting a pet appears also to help with high blood pressure-even a tank full of fish can be beneficial! A researcher at the University of Pennsylvania thinks that ‘companion animals in particular provide an access to intimacy’. You talk to your pet more slowly, you smile a great deal, your voice becomes gentle and the cadence of the speech changes. It is a much more relaxed dialogue, characterized by a combination of touching and talking! Pets exert a calming effect through the day. He found that the presence of pets reduced their owner’s blood pressure by 10-15 per cent. Anything that turns your attention outwards to the natural environment around you is a powerful way of controlling tension.

• Eat onions and garlic. The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia tested extracts of garlic on forty-six hypertensives. Most showed a drop in blood pressure of about 20 points as well as a decrease in physical symptoms. Onions are now known to contain prostaglandins, natural hormone-like substances that lower blood pressure.

• A recent study at the Oregon Health Sciences University has found that there is a link between calcium and high blood pressure. A study of computerized records of 10,000 people in the US aged between 18 and 74 found that there was a direct link between the amount of calcium they ate and their likelihood of suffering from hypertension. People suffering from the disease were on average eating between 18 and 22 per cent less calcium than those with normal blood pressures. Conversely, those who had a high calcium intake had low blood pressure. Clearly much more research needs to be done on this. In any event, the finding does not mean that we should all go out and drink large amounts of milk (which contains calcium), as milk (whole milk at least-skimmed milk is better) contains unwelcome levels of fat.

The role of calcium in blood pressure is complicated and not yet totally worked out, but there is now considerable interest in calcium-antagonist drugs. Epidemiological evidence suggests that there is a link between low dietary calcium and high blood pressure as we have seen, but large trials have yet to be carried out. Some studies giving one gram of calcium to people with normal blood pressure have shown a substantial lowering of blood pressure. There is epidemiological evidence linking high blood pressure in pregnancy with calcium deficiency.