Our blog

Hypertension is one of the most serious diseases in terms of your cardiovascular and overall personal health. Though it isn’t technically a disease on its own, more a group of diseases that can lead to high blood pressure, it’s a serious risk factor for strokes, heart attacks and other dangerous problems. There are many ways to treat hypertension, including medication, diet and exercise, and even herbal remedies. However, many people still suffer from various health problems because of it. But recent studies suggest a new way to treat and manage hypertension, and it involves one of the most accessible parts of your body.

 

What is Hypertension?

Hypertension affects the personal health of around 75 million adults in the United States today. A patient is diagnosed with hypertension when they have persistently high blood pressure. Your blood pressure is the force exerted against the walls of your arteries or veins with each heartbeat. It involves two measurements, the pressure when the blood first leaves the heart and the pressure when it returns.

 

Treatment for this condition depends on the severity. For less severe cases the treatment is diet and exercise, while for more serious cases medication is used to lower the blood pressure. High blood pressure is dangerous because it can thicken the arteries and make the heart work harder to pump blood around the body. This will cause damage that can lead to more serious conditions.

 

What Causes Hypertension?

Doctors aren’t sure about the precise causes of hypertension, but there are a number of risk factors. This includes genetics, obesity, poor diet, lack of exercise, and smoking. Most of these factors can be changed by the individual with health tracking and better lifestyle choices. If you have some of these risk factors you should see your doctor for a thorough health check.

 

According to studies, many hypertension cases arise without any of these risk factors. That’s why recent research has focused on other potential causes such as the influence of organs on blood pressure.

 

Human Skin

People tend to think of their skin as little more than a covering for the more important parts. But skin is more vital to the good functioning of your systems than you know. Our skin is how we sense and know the world, and its structure varies wildly between different species according to the survival needs of each animal. The skin of mammals is among the most complex skin structures on our planet, with most of the variations designed to adapt to the external environment in the best way possible. This means that it’s very likely that your skin has a pivotal role in regulating the most important systems in your body, including your heart.

 

Your Skin and Hypertension

Recent studies have found that skin may play a pivotal role in controlling your blood pressure. Tests performed on mice show that when their skin was exposed to a low oxygen atmosphere, their body reacted by causing blood pressure increases. This is a very important finding, because the skin is the body’s largest organ, so treatment to lower blood pressure may be as simple as increasing oxygen levels in the environment. Previous research has shown that when tissues are starved of oxygen, the blood flow to that area increases to try to compensate, and this may be linked to the more recent research on hypertension. What all this data suggests is that the body’s reaction to low levels of oxygen may have an important effect on how the heart pumps blood around the body.

 

What you can do

Obviously you can’t always control how much you breathe or how much oxygen is in the air around you, but there are some things that you can control. Risk factors such as smoking and obesity lower oxygen levels in the body, which may cause your skin to react and increase your blood pressure. These are elements of your lifestyle that you can control. This research may also have implications for how doctors treat hypertension, though this is further in the future as they gain a greater understanding of the body and its mechanisms.

 

If you want more information on your personal health, and better way to track it, try HomeLab. It will help you monitor your health so you can pick up potential problems early and take them to your doctor.

 

 

Tags: Personal health, health tracking, health check