Measure my Blood Pressure
How does a simple BP monitor save money?
Having a home blood pressure (BP) monitor can help you be more aware of your BP numbers. Usually, people have to go to the doctor’s office or the hospital, in order to get their blood pressure checked. Having your own BP monitor reduces travel expenses.
The actual saving is accomplished, by preventing future complications. Having high blood pressure (hypertension), can put you at risk of damaging valuable organs such as your kidneys, heart and brains. This allows us to understand that we have to keep our BP under control.
Being aware is the key word that we want to emphasize in this post. We have to be aware of our health, if you know the current conditions of your body, you can help prevent many deadly consequences.
Am I doing this right?
Measuring your BP is really simple. The monitor comes with an arm cuff that you can put on. The arm cuff has a symbol that can help you identify how the cuff should be positioned. The symbol looks like a circle with a line going through the middle. This symbol signifies the artery of your arm. That means that you’ll have to put the cuff in alignment of your artery. It’s simpler than you might think, view the image below.
Your morning blood pressure is important to measure. Because if you manage to control your blood pressure in the morning, (its highest peak) you can keep it under control throughout the day.
- Take your Blood Pressure in the morning.
- After 1-2 minutes of sitting in a resting position.
- Within 1 hour of waking up.
- After urination (Less body fluid reduces your blood pressure).
- Before breakfast (Food can alter your BP).
- Before taking any type of medications.
Morning hypertension
The management of “morning hypertension is the most effective way of reaching a controlled blood pressure for 24 hours.
Morning hypertension can be defined as an elevated blood pressure that presents itself mainly in the morning. You should measure your BP twice a day, once you have the BP numbers, you can compare the results. If the morning systolic pressure is more than 15mmHg higher than the evening systolic pressure, you can consider that “morning hypertension”. In the previous article you can find the definition of “systolic pressure”. Here below you can find an example.
Morning Blood pressure = 140/90mmHg
Evening Blood pressure 120/85mmHg
The first number is the systolic blood pressure. The difference between the Morning BP and the evening BP is 20mmHg (140-120=20). This is what we like to call morning-evening difference. If in 3 consecutive days, you have a morning-evening difference higher than 15mmHg, you can officially say that you have “morning Hypertension”.
That is why the control of your morning blood pressure is the most effective way of reaching a perfect BP throughout the day. Evidence shows that if you manage to control your morning blood pressure, you have less risk of organ damage and cardiovascular events.
The masked intruder
A lot of people might have hypertension, but they are not aware of it. Hypertension is a silent killer; it presents no initial symptoms. Once the symptoms present their selves, it’s because an irreversible damage has been done.
There are two concepts that we need to be familiar with.
- 1) Masked Hypertension
- 2) White-Coat Hypertension
Masked hypertension is defined as an elevated blood pressure that doesn’t present itself at the doctor’s office. That means that you can go to your doctor, for your BP measurement and it appears as normal. But when you’re home your blood pressure is elevated, and if you don’t have a home BP monitor at home you wouldn’t know if you have hypertension.
White-Coat hypertension is defined as an elevated blood pressure that presents itself at the doctor’s office, while in other occasions your blood pressure is normal. This is very common in people that are afraid of doctors or get stressed once they have to go to the doctor’s office.
There is a way that doctors can measure your blood pressure for 24 hours. That is what we like to call “ambulatory BP monitoring”.
It is a device that they will strap to your arm, and it will take your BP every 30 minutes, for 24 hours.
The purpose of this method is to observe the fluctuations of your blood pressure. This is an important parameter that helps us discover cardiovascular risk factors.
This ambulatory BP monitor helps you discover possible organ damage caused by an elevated blood pressure, it helps you discover the stressful elements in your life and it helps you discover sleeping disorders that can put you at risk of having a stroke.
Conclusion
If you have a home blood pressure monitor, I highly recommend you measuring you blood pressure the right way. If you don’t have a home BP monitor, this article gave you enough reasons to get one today!
We are in charge of our health, we only have one body and one life, and it is about time that we start taking care of it, before it’s too late.