High blood pressure

Who knows about high blood pressure?

Wife has been diagnosed with high blood pressure and is about to go onto tablets for it. She's not happy about it, and neither am I. She's only in her 30s, and is not overweight, however she is horrendously unfit for her age. When we go out for walks, she can walk miles at a steady pace, but whereas I can run full sprint up a steep a hill for maybe fifty yards, despite being older, heavier and an ex-smoker, she has to plod.

Am I right in thinking that if she gets fit her blood pressure will drop?

 

im quite thin so every one tell me

totley UN FIT Smoke Avarage 50/60 a day out of breath just walking up stairs

i got put on tablets for Artheritus and my blood pressure went throo the roof

like my head and temple was going to explode i complained to my Dr they took me off this tablet called Diklafenic and touch wood havent had it since sorry this wont be of help but its the only experance I Have Had With High BP

My Dad and My Sis Both Sufferd With This and Both Got Treeted With Tablets to Bring it Down and it DID WORK

I Wish Her Well and a Speedy Recovery

 

My brother has recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure.....he's not overweight ,a keen cyclist and eats very healthily.....but does suffer with anxiety....he's been prescribed Beta Blockers untill further notice and he's not happy about it but further checks show his BP is now 'normal'....i understand that sensible exercise makes a difference....someone will be along to give you some more constuctive advice

 

I have been on blood pressure tablets for 10 years now . I remember when they were first prescribed ,I was 51 , I asked how long would I need to take them for , the reply was for the rest of your life ! Now possibly at 30ish with the correct diet and excercise regime you may be able to control it . You would need proper medical advice for this.

 

My mother has taken BP tablets for many years with good results. She probably didn't start till her 50s, though. 30s seems far too young to start on lifelong pill-taking.

I would try regular exercise (gentle at first but building up), a healthy low-salt diet and plenty of relaxation. Hopefully your doctor would say this as well.

 

before taking the tabs, let her try this:

join a gym and do the following:

treadmill:
walk at a brisk pace for 10 minutes

bicycle:
cycle for 10 minutes

cross trainer:
10 minutes

rowing machine:
10 minutes

do this for 5 consecutive days a week ....

after 2 weeks, increase the time per machine by 1 minute per week .... once she has reached 20 minutes per machine, she can try and increase the speed/workrate

combine that with a good diet, a good multivitamin such as Solgar Omnium (bottle says takes 2 per day, but only take 1) and drink lots of water .... and the blood pressure will normalise after a few weeks ....

let the gym check her blood pressure on a weekly basis ... some tesco's also do a comprehensive health check which includes sugar, blood pressure etc etc for a few pounds

problem is if you start with the tabs, it may be difficult to get off them ... if after 3-4 weeks the gym routine does not normalise the blood pressure, then she may have to take the tablets

thats my opinion, but I'm no doctor

 

Mr. F'smum (whose job consists mainly of sitting behind a desk in London, behind a desk in Washington or on a plane between the two) has high blood pressure. He's not overweight, has never smoked and certainly when he's at home anyway, eats healthily - he assures me he does the same in The States. He takes 'the pills', which the Dr. seems to chop and change every times he goes for a BP check and which seem to do very little except (at £7.65 an item) prop up the NHS.

'They' tell him he needs to do regular exercise, although it's kind of difficult to do an aerobic workout within the confines of an aircraft cabin! However, his 'condition' does improve when he's home for any length of time - cycling, brisk walking, gardening or swimming are ideal activities. The point is not to think 'Gosh, I need to get fitter' and start training for a marathon, but to do a little and often and (probably most importantly) regularly. 30 minutes a day, 5 times a week is the 'recommended dose' - but if your wife can't, at first, manage to do the 30 minutes in one hit, then two lots of 15 minutes or even 3 lots of 10 will have the same effect, until she gradually build up to the 30 minutes.

The trouble with 'taking regular exercise' is that, once a Dr. tells you it's what you 'must' do, it can become a chore, especially if you do it because he said so, rather than doing something you enjoy. As I recall, you've got a little 'clueless', so if she's not into gardening, she could do worse than stick him in a buggy and take him for a good brisk walk, perhaps take him swimming, or to a park and give him a push on a swing, or just chase him around the garden!

I'm no expert so I'm not suggesting that regular exercise will lower blood pressure, just that it can certainly help.

 

I agree that it's not pleasant to be told that you must do something which you may not enjoy and isn't natural to you. But where health is concerned I'd have thought a routine with clear-cut daily goals was the best way to go to help shore up your self-discipline. I think I'd have to do that anyway, otherwise I'd find myself skipping sessions.

 

I'd certainly increase the Garlic & Onions in the diet. Lowers blood pressure, cholesterol & reduces the risk of strokes.

And they taste good

 

Good idea. Preferably raw!

 

Thanks for the insights and opinions all. Much appreciated.

The theme seems to be that we're saying that exercise and diet should be discussed with the doctor, as part of the plan to rectify the situation. The trouble is, the wife did ask if it was because she was unfit, and the doctor didn't even attempt to answer. She asked about diet and exercise, and again no interest from the doctor. Its like he decided to prescribe these tablets and nothing wife said was going to change that. That's the most frustrating bit, the fact that it seems the doctors solution to everything is to treat the symptom rather than the cause, get someone in and out the door, and presumably get his payment from the NHS for seeing her, without really having done anything.

I guess i'll have a word with her, see if we can get some sort of exercise regime in place. We'll have to have a close look at our diet too, which to be honest I think is not great lately and could do with a few tweaks anyway. I'll make sure the garlic and onions feature more too.

 

Scrungee eats a lot of Garlic & his blood pressure is actually zero

 

I think joining a gym is the worst thing anyone can do (unless you own a gym)
My reasoning is that most of the equipment you already have a version of, or can do when you go out.
When I was younger the only people you found at a gym were people training to be boxers or wrestlers, ordinary folk got exercise by walking here and there, or as kids running around and playing. If you sit and watch TV all day or sit in an office try walking to and from work (if its within reason) or perhaps go for a walk lunch time. (or when you can, but do walk)
One other thing, how can some one you don't know tell you what you "must do" if they have never met you?
Drinking water does help, but the one that does it for me about a gym, is how do you get there? you drive. Why?

Always reminds me of

 

Hello Clueless

Your post sounds all too familiar and makes me rather cross. I suppose it's good that we're all monitored so closely but doctors have got bees in their bonnets about high blood pressure at the moment and I am not at all convinced that a young woman in her thirties should be placed on a drug that she's then expected to take for the rest of her life when, to be perfectly frank, the latest medical wisdom about hbp changes with the wind and no one quite knows what a lifetime on the medication does to people.

I too was in my late thirties when I went for a routine blood pressure check. I was asked if I would like one, and in my innocence I said yes. I was (and still am) a weeny size 8 and I'd just come out of the gym, having polished off an aerobics class with an hour of gentle yoga, so I was feeling pretty chilled. I'd had my blood pressure taken before and it was always fine. I knew something was up when the doctor started pursing her lips and retesting me. For some reason, the reading was suddenly sky high. Of course, the fact that the doctor was tense made me tense, so subsequent readings were so high they threatened to bust the monitor. From then on, things got silly. I was told to make another appointment with the surgery but then the staff obviously had a good old chin wag about me and the upshot was that a nurse knocked on my door over the weekend, obviously concerned that I might have blown up or spontaneously combusted or something before I could get to the surgery again. I was told that I couldn't make a civilised appointment but had to camp out at the surgery to see the next available doctor. I was left waiting for hours. Somehow, in the space of a day or so, I'd gone from a fit person who could outpace quite a lot of twenty year olds at the gym to an invalid who might keel over at any point. All this wasn't doing much for my blood pressure.

I was told that I needed to go on to medication immediately, but that the dose I would need to bring my blood pressure down was so high that I'd have to start on a smaller dose and work up to required amount, otherwise I'd become dizzy. The initial dose was 10 mg of Lisinopril. 'It won't be enough to do anything to you,' said the doctor cheerfully. Within hours I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. I was moving like an octogenarian and had to keep sitting down. I'm not the tearful type but I found myself crying because I was so enfeebled. No one warned me not to drive or operate machinery on this 'low' dose, but I was definitely not fit to do either. Frankly, if I'd been behind a wheel I could have killed somebody. When I checked my blood pressure, it was very low, sometimes dipping well below 80/60 (normal readings are generally somewhere around 120/80, a bit more if you're an older person). I decided to halve the dose and then weaned myself off entirely. My blood pressure was fine - sometimes slightly above the ideal, but not nearly enough to worry about.

Most of the time, I don't have high blood pressure. For some unknown reason (there's no obvious link to stress) it does shoot up from time to time. Medical opinion varies as to whether I should therefore be on medication all the time or not. My feeling is that I don't want to take anything that I don't have to. High blood pressure can cause some very serious health problems, but them no one knows what the consequences of forty years on Lisinopril are either.

The thing that really angers me is that I now have to declare the fact that I have/had high blood pressure every time I apply for insurance. I was looking at some of the fat unhealthy lumps who were boarding my plane for Crete and thinking how ironic it was that most of them were probably paying the basic rate of holiday insurance, whereas I had to fork out an additional premium. I'm pretty sure that I'm a lot less likely to conk out than some of the sights you see, but I now have a lifetime of answering additional questions and paying high premiums ahead of me simply because the NHS happened to have one of its periodic panics about hbp. It's put me off any further screening. The screening for breast cancer, for example, is notoriously unreliable; there are far too many false positives. I realise I have become just like my mother, who never involves a doctor in her life unless she has absolutely no choice. She is eighty and her only hospital visit has been for a hip replacement, so she hasn't done so badly.

Sorry. This has turned out to be an essay. Clueless, tell your missus to do a bit of exercise, change her diet and (if you haven't already done so) invest in a good blood pressure monitor. At her age, she has a very low risk of a stroke, one of the main dangers of hbp, so she has time on her side. See how things go for a while before allowing anyone to stick her on drugs forever more. Any doctor worth his/her salt should give her time to get the pressure down without drugs before taking other measures.

The older I get, the more likely I am to trust my own judgement rather than that of a professional who's got all excited about the latest medical fad.

 

I agree, this is really disappointing. I think they did the same with my mum - here's the pills, off you go. Having said that, I think my mother would not have taken on board any advice about lifestyle change - because that's the way she is! She, like many others, would have lacked the motivation and self-discipline to make any changes. She's now 86 so hasn't done too badly.

I guess doctors see a lot of people who they judge to be very unlikely to take a proactive stance about improving their health -after all, the people they see most of are the habitual smokers, overweight and unfit. It's hard to change these behaviour patterns, and with a lot of people, it might be a waste of time trying to do so. So, rather than spend a lot of time on changing habits it's easier and possibly more effective to prescribe medication.

I think you should go back to your doctor and ask some searching questions.