Your Lifestyle and Hypertension (Part 1)
Hypertension is a chronic (long-term) medical condition that is characterized by a persistent increase in the blood pressure in our arteries. This is why it is also called High Blood Pressure (HBP). We may have come across it in many kinds of literature being referred to as a silent killer! Yes. It sure is one. Nobody wants to reach the end of the time of life, at least not at an age when much work is still left undone, words left unsaid, and special people left unloved. This is where it gets a little dicey. More than 50% of those with hypertension do not even know that they have it! More like an insecure king wining and dining with a traitor and a lot of times many more traitors as we shall come to realize in prospect.
Here are some epidemiological facts to serve as an eye-opener for us to understand what is really at stake here
Hypertension is generally of two types. A primary type and of course a secondary type. The primary type is caused by non-specific factors involving one's lifestyle or genetic predisposition. These factors include but are not limited to smoking, obesity, high salt intake, sedentary lifestyle, and depression and it accounts for over 95% of the total hypertensive individuals. The remaining 5% or thereabout have the second type of hypertension which is due to or secondary to known pre-existing causes such as chronic kidney disease, hormonal abnormalities, use of birth control pills, pregnancy, coarctation of the largest artery in the body, the aorta and stenosis of one or both renal arteries.
Fortunately, hypertension is one of those medical conditions which are readily preventable, and then proper treatments, preventive techniques, and management strategies are well utilized. This means there is virtually one way to know your Hypertensive status. This is in essence but in fact that it is by getting your blood pressure checked frequently. Hypertension if left unchecked, could cause any of the following:
1. Coronary artery disorder; a disease of the blood vessels that supply the heart itself with nutrients and blood
2. Heart failure
3. Stroke
4. Blindness
5. Chronic Kidney Disease
6. Peripheral Vascular Disease
7. Multiorgan Failure
8. Death
Why must I examine my lifestyle?
I would start with those who love salt so much that we even salt our soft drinks, drinking water, and bathing water. I would have to bring our minds back to the Ebola virus outbreak in Nigeria some years ago where different sacrilegious ideas came up from nowhere advising people to chew kola nut with salt water and to have their baths with salt water. I hope we know that many people supposedly died of this act than from the disease outbreak itself.