High Blood Pressure
High blood pressure (hypertension) is a condition in which pressure in the arteries is abnormally high. This condition greatly increases your likelihood of stroke, aneurysm (a bulge in the wall of a blood vessel or the heart), heart failure, heart attack, kidney damage, and other problems. The consequences of hypertension are common and serious: heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and cerebrovascular disease (blood vessels of the brain) is the third-leading cause. You are "hypertensive" if you have an average diastolic blood pressure of 90 mm Hg or higher or an average systolic blood pressure of 140 mm Hg or higher.
Among other benefits, treatment of hypertension can reduce the death rate for coronary heart disease. This rate begins to increase for systolic blood pressures above 110 mm Hg and diastolic pressures above 70 mm Hg. However, the greatest benefit seems to occur for cerebrovascular diseases. Treatment of high blood pressure received most of the credit for the 50% reduction in death from stroke that has occurred since the 1970s. Experts estimate that the rate of coronary heart disease would be 14% lower and the rate of strokes would be 42% lower if all hypertensive people had an average reduction in diastolic blood pressure of 5–6 mm Hg.
