Living with a medical condition can create many challenges in a person’s daily life and sadly, there are way too many illnesses that can potentially strike us at some point.
And in all parts of the world, hypertension remains one of most rampant and abrasive, with more than 1.56 billion people expected to be hypertensive by 2025. In the Philippines—a country that love its food salty—it is attributed to worsening the lives of 14 million sufferers.
Hypertension is a silent killer. Its symptoms don’t always manifest until it sneaks up on you in the dead of night with any of the potentially deadly complications it brings along—one of which are the onset of cardiovascular diseases, including stroke, coronary artery disease, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and peripheral vascular disease.
For instance, the heart of a person suffering from hypertension will have to work harder to circulate blood throughout the body. The extra effort the heart is exerting is going to make it thicker and stiffer by weakening the myocardial and arterial walls as it continues to work in this manner, compromising the normal functioning of the heart.
This, then, will lead to heart failure—a serious medical condition that can incur extra fluid buildup in the body and can cause arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat).
Aside from heart failure, all the mechanical stress by heart can clog easily to fatty buildups in the arteries called atherosclerosis. If the blood clot occurs in an artery to your heart and cuts off the blood supply to the cardiac muscle, a heart attack can happen. On the other hand, if the clot blocks an artery to the brain and cuts blood supply, it will lead to an ischaemic stroke.
Age is also a risk factor when it comes to hypertension and cardiovascular risk. As one gets older, the systolic blood pressure becomes an even more important predictor, especially since the odds of developing hypertension by age 55-65 increases to 90 percent.
If remained untreated, a hypertensive heart attack, or any of these cardiovascular diseases, can be deadly and it counts as the leading cause of illness and death from high blood pressure.
Hypertension is not an end and all condition. Living a normal life is doable.
But it will take a lot of conscious effort from you, if you’ve been recently diagnosed with hypertension, to overhaul your lifestyle. With a healthy low salt diet, physical activity, maintaining a healthy weight, and of course, a sustained maintenance medication, you can make the condition manageable, and significantly reduce the risk of acquiring a heart-related disease.
Regular check-up and monitoring by a healthcare provider are also crucial to countering the worst hypertension has to offer. In ManilaMed, a roster of excellent medical professionals are available to help you in your journey in fighting off the disease.
Schedule an appointment with our expert physicians today so you can start to #FeelBetter! Contact our Patient Relations Team at (02) 8523-8131 to 65 loc 2062/2203 and 09178672757 for more details.