What Is a Good BP?

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Clarissa

September 12, 2015

There is a huge article, or even a series of articles, in the NYTimes communicating the results of a supposedly groundbreaking study that points to a healthy systolic blood pressure being under. . . 120.

I have absolutely no idea how this can be news to anybody. I’ve known for at least three decades that systolic BP should be 120 or lower and diastolic BP should be 80 and lower. The NYTimes article states that the former guidelines considered systolic BP of 140 or 150 to be good. This is extremely shocking to me. With the systolic of 150, I feel so ill that I can’t function at all. Anybody who experienced it should know that it isn’t normal.

This reminds me of that bizarro documentary where a fellow with an angry girlfriend decided to “prove” that food sold at McDonald’s is not healthy. When the first McDonald’s opened in my city in Ukraine back in 1996, we all knew this was unhealthy food. How is it possible for Americans to spend their entire lives around this stuff and not know that it’s unhealthy?

What’s with this self-infantilization of people who can’t figure out on their own that a systolic BP of 150 is not OK and that fast food is harmful?

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12 responses to “What Is a Good BP?”

cliff arroyo

September 12, 2015

130 and I’m iffy, 140 and I have horribly pulsing headaches that make me useless

what’s up with these fools?

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1. Clarissa
  
  September 12, 2015
  
  I have the same experience. I once had 140 for a week and thought I was going to die. I can’t imagine a doctor who wouldn’t pay attention to this kind of BP.
  
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TomW

September 12, 2015

I feel absolutely nothing when my blood pressure is higher or lower. When I first started treatment for it, it was 195/110 and I felt just fine.

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1. Clarissa
  
  September 12, 2015
  
  Wow. Man, that’s scary because 195 is pre-stroke. I hope you found a functioning treatment.
  
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  1. TomW
    
    September 12, 2015
    
    Yes, it’s better now. I take medicine and I’ve improved on diet and exercise. It’s usually around 130/85 these days. I’m working to get it lower, but my doctor isn’t too worried as long as it remains stable at this level.
    
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Dreidel

September 12, 2015

I’m a retired doctor, and here’s some free medical advice:

People shouldn’t be getting medical information from the NYT or any other lay publication, period, full stop. A single medical study proves NOTHING except that further studies are needed to confirm or disprove the first study.

Also, one person’s anecdotal experience about a specific blood pressure level tells nothing except how that one person felt. You can’t accurately apply how your body felt to generalizations about hypertensive disease.

For years, I had resistant-to-medication hypertension that ran about 160/110, and I felt FINE, no bodily symptoms at all. Now, the right combination of medication has finally got my average pressures down to 115/55, and I feel — FINE, NO NOTICEABLE PHYSICAL DIFFERENCE. (I’m much less likely to have a stroke, but physically my body feels exactly the same.)

I treated lot of patients with hypertension, and @TomW’s anecdotal experience reflects that of most of my hypertensive patients. They had no perceptible physical symptoms when their pressures were elevated.

To repeat: anecdotal medical experience is worthless, whether it comes from all the “healthier-than-thou” obese fat-apologists on a hundred fat-acceptance websites, or from the 115-year-old three-pack-a-day smoker in the Guiness Book of World Records.

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1. The Dark Avenger
  
  September 12, 2015
  
  My wife’s people, the Illocano of the Philippine Islands, have a tendency to get high blood, as they call it, when they get older and don’t move around as much.
  
  I think the only advice that should be taken from these articles is “Check with your physician for further information about this problem before undertaking any life style changes.”
  
  I had a great-aunt who was on reserpine, which was used to treat hypertension in the 50s when she was diagnosed, but is now rarely used for that purpose, because she did so well on it.
  
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2. Clarissa
  
  September 12, 2015
  
  That lucky, lucky 115-year-old…
  
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Shakti

September 12, 2015

High blood pressure is a silent killer. Most people are asymtomatic.

My maternal grandmother had a heart attack early in her life soon after my last aunt was born. In her last years, she had a primary care physician who was pretty lax about her blood pressure so her blood pressure sent her straight into renal failure. Even after she was diagnosed, she didn’t do anything and none of the extended family did anything until a year later when she started turning blue. She spent the last few years of her life in a lot of pain and in the hospital constantly. I try not to think about it because I’ll get angry all over again to no purpose.

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1. Clarissa
  
  September 12, 2015
  
  What a tragic story. I’m very sorry for your grandmother. I also have somebody in the family who ignored blood pressure straight into a stroke. This is a very serious issue.
  
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leahjanegrey

September 12, 2015

I had extremely high blood pressure all throughout high school, especially for a teenager. Doctors were concerned, special low-salt low-fat diets were discussed, and they told me to stop drinking red bull (I don’t drink red bull but it’s apparently a common culprit for high blood pressure in the under-30 crowd) What ended up curing it was moving out of my house and going off to college. It was my family’s constant drama and violence that was making me have such unusually high blood pressure, because it was like living in an emotional pressure cooker.
Now my only health problems are an iodine and iron deficiency, which are cured by eating red meat and iodized salt. 🙂

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1. Clarissa
  
  September 12, 2015
  
  This makes a lot of sense. Psychoanalytically, high BP comes from repressed anger. And in young people, anger is always a result of chaotic family environments.
  
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