Causes of high blood pressure
We’ve looked at the effects; now lets examine some of the causes. “What causes high blood pressure is the ‘$64,000 question:” Dr. Toto says. Because in more than 95 percent of high blood pressure cases, doctors can’t pinpoint the cause.
Two factors are probably at play, says Carlos Ferrario, M.D., director of the Hypertension Center at the Bowman Gray/Baptist Hospital Medical Center in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Heredity
If your family has a history of high blood pressure, you’re probably at much greater risk of developing it. Dr. Ferrario says researchers are getting closer to identifying the specific genes linked to high blood pressure. That would allow doctors to test whether you’re in danger. Until then, he suggests you shake your family tree a little. If you find an uncle, aunt, sister, brother, parent or grandparent with high blood pressure, be sure to get regular blood pressure checks.
Lifestyle
Even if you have heredity working against you, you may not get high blood pressure. “Very much depends on your lifestyle,” Dr. Ferrario says. Being overweight, not getting enough exercise, smoking, high-fat, high-salt diets and stress all may contribute to high blood pressure. “When you start combining those factors.
such as being overweight and smoking-the risk really begins to increase;’ Dr. Ferrario says.
Psychological factors
Your state of mind can also playa role in high blood pressure. A 20-year study of 1,123 American adults found that severe anxiety and worry make middle-aged men twice as likely to develop high blood pressure. Data for this study came from the famous Framingham Heart Study, which tracked the health of more than 5,200 adult residents of Framingham, Massachusetts. Job stress may lead to high blood pressure, too. A study of 129 working adults found that those with highpressure jobs-positions with lots of responsibility but little decision-making power-showed bigger increases in blood pressure during the workday than those with less demanding jobs. While everyone’s blood pressure rose at work, the highstress men had jumps of six points in systolic pressure and four points in diastolic pressure compared with their less stressed coworkers. Anger may playa role in high blood pressure as well, says Patrick Mulrow, M.D., chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Medical College of Ohio at Toledo and chairman of the American Heart Association’s Council for High Blood Pressure Research, though the evidence is sketchy and sometimes contradictory.
Scientists have found that the combination of too much sodium and high stress can create a powerful pressure problem. A study of 32 students at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore showed that people who ate highsodium diets and faced high-stress conditions for a two-week period saw their systolic blood pressure readings jump more than 6 points. The high-sodium, low-stress people, by comparison, saw increases of just 0.6 point, and the low-sodium, highstress people showed increases of just 0.1 point.