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46% of Americans Now Have High Blood Pressure (nbcnews.com)
"Millions more Americans will now be diagnosed with high blood pressure," reports NBC News, which describes the condition as "one of the leading killers around the world."
Anyone with blood pressure higher than 130/80 will be considered to have hypertension, or high blood pressure, the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology said in releasing their new joint guidelines. "It's very clear that lower is better," said Dr. Paul Whelton of Tulane University, who chaired the committee that wrote the guidelines... 130/80 to 139/89 is now considered Stage 1 hypertension and anything 140/90 or above will be considered stage 2 hypertension...
"Rather than one in three U.S. adults having high blood pressure (32 percent) with the previous definition, the new guidelines will result in nearly half of the U.S. adult population (46 percent) having high blood pressure, or hypertension," the groups said in a joint statement... While people may be confused by the change, the heart experts said three years of reviewing the research showed that many fewer people die if high blood pressure is treated earlier. "We are comfortable with the recommendations. They are based on strong evidence," Whelton said.
Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna blames the pharmaceutical lobby, arguing that "a few years down the line, we all will be taking blood pressure medications," though Dr. Robert Carey of the University of Virginia, who helped write the guidelines, claims there will only be a 1.9% increase.
The new guidelines recommend that everyone watch their diet and exercise, and that people with stage 1 hypertension should also first try eating less salt, more vegetables, fruits, and whole grains before taking blood pressure medications.
"Rather than one in three U.S. adults having high blood pressure (32 percent) with the previous definition, the new guidelines will result in nearly half of the U.S. adult population (46 percent) having high blood pressure, or hypertension," the groups said in a joint statement... While people may be confused by the change, the heart experts said three years of reviewing the research showed that many fewer people die if high blood pressure is treated earlier. "We are comfortable with the recommendations. They are based on strong evidence," Whelton said.
Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna blames the pharmaceutical lobby, arguing that "a few years down the line, we all will be taking blood pressure medications," though Dr. Robert Carey of the University of Virginia, who helped write the guidelines, claims there will only be a 1.9% increase.
The new guidelines recommend that everyone watch their diet and exercise, and that people with stage 1 hypertension should also first try eating less salt, more vegetables, fruits, and whole grains before taking blood pressure medications.
Millions more will be diagnosed now that the numbers have been adjusted to sell more prescriptions.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
They aren't going to stop until we are all given pre-natal prescriptions.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Death is the cure
diet high in proper fat and protein needs to be added to those veggies and fruit. If you're in the USA better to skip the whole grains altogether except as occassional treat, monsanto and company's franken-wheat causes many digestive disorders and elevated blood sugar levels.
Most of this is caused by meat eating and can be prevented with a vegetable-based diet.
At age 25, I was 6' 3", 160 lbs, and exercised. I had high blood pressure and the doc wanted to put me on medication. I thought I was too young for high blood pressure medication. I instead started eating salads instead of sandwiches, quit eating deli meat, and avoid processed and high sodium foods. I'm now 35, still 160 lbs, and my blood pressure is well within a normal range. You don't need pills. Eat healthy instead.
Let's just lower the standard so we spend more money on treating nothing.
Might as well lower the weight and BMI that define obesity. God knows how many die each year from being a lard butt.
Let me fix that for you:
try eating less crap! try to find a less hostile working environment. and most important, don't take on debt.
Breath slow and deep. Learn how to work a defibrillator.
You're welcome
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Orgasms lower blood pressure. Americans aren't getting enough sex. Prescribe vibrators.
Is systemd responsible for this increased blood pressure? I know that any time I have to deal with a modern Linux installation that uses systemd, I tend to get very aggravated and I'm pretty sure my blood pressure shoots through the roof. Thankfully I have found a simple home remedy: FreeBSD. Nothing soothes anger as well as an OS that's simple, reliable, and that embodies the UNIX philosophy.
for routine physicals. A doctor will take some measurements and order some blood work, and BAM! he's got you on three subscription medications.... all covered under your employer's insurance plan, of course.
But unnecessary medications are damaging to people's health.
"Congratulations! You now have a "pre-existing condition", so please enjoy the massive increase in your health insurance premiums!" - literally every insurance company in America
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Vegetables sure, but grains? No way. Try looking into Keto; it virtually guarantees lower blood pressure.
Visions going Obvious that there
Nutrition table overview (Diets of various tribes and their health.)
Assuming honesty... this makes it blatantly obvious what the problem in.
It's not fat. It’s not even carbs per se. But it' definitely something correlating with short acellular carbs.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3402009/ ... So what's different? Maybe our mass-produced potatoes are merely just bags of mostly starch and water, and the taro roots contain much higher quantities of micronutrients. Maybe some other ingredients.
One thing still needs to be clarified though. As e.g. the Kitavans also cook their starchy taro roots for a long time. So they should be no better/worse than our potatoes. Yet the Kitavans are healthy.
I wish I could do a simple difference analysis. E.g. with people from Peru, who eat lots of potatoes which still are very rich in micronutrients.
Either 140/90 is high or 130/80. Tell us why we should believe you this time around?
Sorry to burst everyone's bubble, but Big Pharma isn't getting rich on this one.
I've been taking Lisinopril for high blood pressure for a couple years now and a 90 day supply (1 x 20 mg tablet) costs me $3.00 with insurance. Without insurance it is about 3x-4x higher, from what I've seen.
At 1/3 of a penny per dose, *my cost*, that isn't exactly high profit margin. U.S. Patents expired in 2002, meaning right now it is one of the cheapest medications available. Over the counter aspirin costs more.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Millions more ARE sick.Frankly, pretty much EVERYONE is sick. They might be slender athletes... but look at their Leptin resistance, and you'll see that they are basically "fatasses" too, who are just starving themselves more. Their energy homeostasis is just as much ruined.
But obviously, "solving" it with prescriptions is as stupid as taking painkillers while continuing to run, head-first, into the wall. Especially if the symptoms are only concealed as long as you pay.
This was the most useful piece of info I ever read on the subject.
(Including the article it accompanies.)
Try eating less crap! (Abolish capitalism)
Try to find a less hostile working environment. (Abolish capitalism)
Most important, don't take on debt. (Abolish capitalism)
100% agree
And tell you that you eat all wrong and you have to eat ... well, whatever the latest eating craze is today. Eat this, eat that, and avoid this because it's poison. No matter that the next person recommends eating exactly that and only that, because what you just suggested is killing you within the year.
You know what? Take your eating disorder in the making and stuff it. As we can see right now, whenever we manage to get healthier, we just move the goalpost on unhealthy. Lower number of heart diseases? Just invent a few new ones!
We're getting older than ever before. And we die when we get to age 80 from diseases that didn't exist before because, guess what, we died from other diseases that we don't die from anymore. This is a GOOD thing people. Going on a diet that won't make you die at 80 because what you're eating now is slowly (insert bad thing for your body here) isn't going to do you any good if it gives you (bad thing that makes your organ fail) at 50. Then you won't die at 80 from (bad thing) but at 50 from (other bad thing).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
under the current administration. There's only one person to blame for that...
You make a good point. The USSR, Mao-era China, North Korea today, and Venezuela today all prove that you're right. If the goal is to have almost no food, almost no jobs, and almost no economy, then rejecting capitalism in favor of socialism or Communism is definitely the way to go.
Less salt means less iodine in the diet. Look at what happens when you are iodine deficient. I am not talking about goiter. Recommended daily iodine is NOT the level the govt. recommends. RDI is much higher. Do your research.
they get you on the preexist list for stuff like this
Now it cones out = we all need to watch our diet = with respect to who's guidance?
The USDA Food Pyramid?
The American Heart Association's Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations?
American College of Cardiology
The USDA food Pyramid was built as much as a marketing tool for the food industry as it is a nutrition guide.
You could try this Japanese Health and Nutrition information but there is no way to tell if it is actually better, or if the users that make that claim are suffering from confirmation bias.
Itâ(TM)s sugar. Stop eating so much freaking sugar. Also avoid low fat versions of everything (they have more sugar added!).
Fat is fine, and vegetable fats are good for you.
Protein is key, eat a lot of it
Fiber. Eat the hell out of fiber!
Eat fruit if you want something sweet, funnily enough fruits are sweet but have a ton of fiber, the sweeter the fruit the more fiberous. Itâ(TM)s like God knew what he was doing...
Fructose is literally treated like a poison in your liver...
American ultracapitalism produces a race to the bottom where there are no jobs, economic stagnation is the new normal, and hey look I can't afford food either.
I wonder if this is related at all to the fact 46% of American's are now clinically obese.
Hmm.
Hmmmmmm.
Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Because even *thinking* about America nowadays, as a non native, raises my blood pressure no end. Glad I don't have to rely on their healthcare though.
But America has been consuming heavily processed foods longer than any other nation.
this is about nothing else than to sell more pills, and pills for those side-effects, and more for their side-effects.
Stop eating sugar and carbs, add more salt and butter and oops your hypertension is gone
In a world where everyone has high blood pressure I suspect we will soon be seeing an uptick of nobody taking such diagnosis seriously amid general growing mistrust of the medical industrial complex for grievances real and imagined.
Ultimately even if you ignore studies showing half of all academic papers are bullshit and work under the assumption there is technical merit to the conclusions it still might be prudent to consider real world implications and take a different tact than California did when declaring everything causes cancer.
physicians don't even have a standardised way to measure blood pressure. One measurement won't tell you much. You can't say my blood pressure
is x/y. it can vary a lot and always depends on the circumstance it is measured. To say my blood pressure dropped by 3 points is stupid, because
my estimate is that the margine of error is at least, depending on the method, between 5 and 10 mm/Hg and not only because of the error of the devices, but also because your physician is a factor for error. Add to that, the variance during the day, the fact that you are supposed to be at rest,
which sometimes is not possible for some people, because physicians make them nervous.
So in order to determine your blood pressure, you need at least several measurements a day, for maybe a week. And then you have to look at the curve and at the activity before after and during the measurement. So saying x/y is high blood pressure is stupid. But since medicine is not a science, but just some amateurs playing with statistics, what can you expect?
No, it's "abolish capitalizing"...
Truckers who drive semis and other large vehicles already have to have a medical certificate part of which is to not have high blood pressure over certain limits. This is to avoid strokes and heart attacks causing them to lose control of their vehicles. This is probably a reasonable precaution.
The allowable levels currently set by regulation rather than the AHA guidelines, but there may be pressure from this to tighten those limits. Personally, I don't see this as needed.
Are truckers who have 130/80 BP really a serious threat to our safety?
(Full disclosure: I have a Class A CDL, but don't currently work as a trucker.)
"You can be healthy at any pressure".
"I can't imagine many other systems that could manage to keep alive a group of people as chronically unhealthy as the Americans."
One big reason U.S. citizens are "chronically unhealthy": They work too much.
Another reason: Women in the U.S. are often anti-male. That results in children who have poor parenting. Those children become unhealthy adults.
There seems to be a general agreement that U.S. health care is TERRIBLE. One article: Healthcare's Perfect Storm of Greed and Incompetence (Oct. 16, 2014).
Quote: "As the U.S. healthcare system slips further into the cellar of metrics for quality and outcomes among the advanced nations of the world, and does it at more than twice the average per capita cost,..."
That article links to 2014 Update: How the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally
Result: Of 11 developed countries, the U.S. is last.
Take a walk trough any walmart and be amazed at how whales have somehow managed to drag themselves out of the ocean, dress, and learned how to drive mobility scooters.
Evolution in action.
Or perhaps the result of decades of "it's okay to be fat" messaging.
If you have hypertension and are 20 pounds overweight, lose those pounds! This may be more important than eating a lot of vegetables or eating less salt. Another thing you can do is cut down your alcohol consumption. Drink one light beer instead of 3 pints of 10% alcohol craft beer a day and you blood pressure will be lower.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
You're using the same fallacy as so many, even in research...
You're only counting death as a problem.
But death is not bad. Because if you're dead, it doesn't hurt and you don't give a fuck.
What is actually horrible, is being alive yet suffering!
And currently, nearly every person starts to have loads of illnesses by the age of 40, 30, now even school kids. You'd be surprised how many can't even reproduce anymore without medical help.
It has gotten so bad, that we now call many illnesses just "age-related". Implying that they are the result of age. But they're not. Those tribes in the table don't have any of them! No hair loss, no clogged arteries, no high blood pressure, no obesity.
The are merely the result of decades of self-harming behavior. The body has an amazing capability to compensate and cope. But too much is too much.
So go ahead: Ridicule, with those primitive thought-terminating clichees. And see if that makes your life any better when you’re >40.
Big Pharma is very good at scaring people into thinking they are sick. And the magical cure always seems to be some sort of pill. What big pharma is even better at is coming up with so called "maintenance drugs" that never actually cure anything. Lipitor is a prime example of this. You can take it for 10 years and it will help keep your cholesterol down but the moment you go off it your counts go right back where they were when you started. In other words, you are stuck taking this drug for life. Blood pressure medications work the same way.
Some people might read this article and come to the conclusion that people are less healthy. In fact, all that has happened is that the medical industry (with some nudging I'm sure from big pharma) has lowered the bar. All of a sudden they have a new pool of patients to pitch their blood medication drugs to.
The cold hard reality is that for many people these drugs are completely unnecessary. Blood pressure and cholesterol can be controlled by diet and exercise. But it seems that for many doctors the first course of action is to prescribe pills instead. The medical industry, just like nearly every other industry, has been corrupted by money.
They adjusted down the range of BMI which qualified you as overweight or obese.
I don't mind that they're doing this to encourage people to stay in a healthy range as they collect new data. I just wish there was a way the could do it without redefining what certain words mean.
and now almost all adults now have hypertension.
Several things are happening across America at present:
- Adjusting the numbers to lower the threshold for things like high blood pressure, diabetes, and cholesterol
- "Forced" (higher premiums if you don't participate) annual physicals at work to keep insurance "affordable"
- Nicotine tests annually to see who is a tobacco uses (higher premium if found to be a user)
My job does all three. Starting this year (November open enrollment) everyone had to have a full physical with blood pressure, blood work, glucose/diabetes test, cotinine (nicotine) test, and fecal occult test. Failure to comply means a $50 insurance premium per month. Husbands and wives of employees on the plan are subject to the same requirements.
I am refusing to play the game despite the higher premiums. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the thin edge of a wedge of what's to come. I will never comply even if it means I lose my job and end up mowing lawns with the illegals.
Ding ding ding! And the life insurance arms get to charge more now that what was normal range is now a high BP diagnosis.
This is nothing more than a scam to get you to cough up more money in insurance premiums. It's about as useful as having non-engineers decide on CAFE standards.
Itâ(TM)s not that hard.
If people would stop seeking comfort in food and learn how the body processes the different food items, then people would enjoy better health.
The rules (reality much?):
* If you can't catch it or grow it, don't eat it (You can't catch or grow candy, soft drinks, etc.)
* Those who won't make time for fitness now will be forced to make time for illness later
* Garbage in, garbage out
* How many obese 70 year old people have you ever seen?
You wouldn't pour mud in the gas tank and expect your car to run properly would you? Stop treating your stomach like a trashcan.
This was guaranteed to happen eventually.
Medicated blood pressure to reduce it is, definitionally, a weighted moving average, trending downward.
Cholesterol is on the same slope.
Blood pressure was considered normal at 140/90 in the 1970's; now 120/80 is "the new normal".
Expect it to continue to decrease, as more medication is prescribed, because -- in fact -- the average will be lower over time, if you average it across all people, rather than just untreated people.
... but nobody ever tells me that I can eat more salt.
My blood pressure kept increasing and when it hit 40+, I started using grape seed extract. This brought it down and controlled it. I eventually discovered that Sweet and Low was causing it to increase. After stopping the use of Sweet and Low (only 5 packets in morning coffee), my blood pressure went back to normal and has remained around 110/70 to 125/80.
Shit...readers might notice something. Better distract them: "Appy app Trump leftist proletarian Luddites." *sigh of relief* Crises avoided.
You would have high blood pressure too if you were as worried as I am about the Democrats being in charge of the country again and this time completing the job of killing off whatever is left of the country and our freedoms.
"Congratulations! You now have a "pre-existing condition", so please enjoy the massive increase in your health insurance premiums!" - literally every insurance company in America
I find it hilarious that this got modded as "Flamebait", as if insurance companies don't list high blood pressure as a pre-existing condition (and don't increase your premiums for it). They sure as shit do. Ask me how I know.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
let's see.. rat race. the joneses... the lack of fun, happy and cool in our hourly news...
just unplug the boob tube... read the internet news like slash dot where shit is really cool....
piss off american drug manufacturing pill pushers and your government players and politicians... bugger...
i have 135 over 85 and they said I had high blood pressure... me.. read the pattern.. . 140/90, 130/80, 120/80, 170/95, 125/70, 105/60... hmmmm .. and other stuff.. time of day...
essential hyper tension
I've always been told that I eat too much salt. So one day I decided to cut down. Food tasted bland for a few days, until I got used to the lower salt levels.
But then it started. I would wake up every hour during the night, needing to pee and a very dry throat. Every f**king hour.
This didn't happen immediately, so I didn't connect the dots. Not until much later, when I read that the body requires a certain salt/water balance, and I just happened to eat some salty snacks the same evening, and got a full nights sleep.
Since then, I've been making sure to add more salt than I otherwise would when cooking, and even then, it appears I'm still a bit on the low side (I'm down to waking up once or twice per night, which becomes zero after a couple of nights when visiting my family).
Turns out the whole "too much salt" is based on some UN recommendation that sets the MAX recommended salt intake to the lowest survivable amount, which is about half as much as what the body considers the minimum amount.
... no wait, that would be too much like actually solving the problem. Let's just talk about eating "more fruits and vegetables" without actually telling people that (obviously) humans aren't supposed to drink milk once weaned, certainly aren't supposed to ever drink the milk of another animal, aren't supposed to eat eggs, and aren't supposed to eat meat, seeing as we are physically incapable of catching and killing animals with our bare hands and teeth - and anybody who could do this would be viewed, quite rightly, as a complete psychopath, thus proving how unnatural this behaviour is.
But no, Americans will carry on eating huge quantities of meat, become ill, and then expect somebody else to magically save them from their own greed and stupidity.
Just because they artificially move the goal posts doesn't mean I have high blood pressure.
Unless it's really high (under the old guidelines) I will not be taking an un-needed pharma pills.
Nice try big pharma, but NO thank you.
-Miser
All these BP 'standards' are based on statistical averages and as such may or may not apply to any given individual. It's like BMI charts: also based on statistical models centered around a theoretical 'average person', and as such may tell you you're obese when in fact you just have a lot of lean muscle mass and/or very dense bones (like I have; DXA scan confirmed for both) making you heavier overall. Don't necessarily listen to the scare tactics your doctor may be feeding you, you may not need any medication at all if your BP is slightly higher than normal (like mine is, and always has been, since I was a kid; I'm an endurance athlete, vigorous exercise 5-6 days a week 52 weeks out of the year).
I thank several posters for clarifying that no one is profiting from these new standards,
My concern on reading this is that blood pressure is extremely variable on a daily basis. During Cardiac Rehab we were constantly told that it can vary by as much as 20 mm over the course of a day. (The NIH seems to agree - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11769383.) So a variation of 10 mm changing you from normal to Stage 1 hypertension ignores the normal variations and is misleading the public.
Needles to say these natural variations ignore the variations introduced by the method of measurement which have their own standard deviations (https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/158/12/1218/90767 and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jch.12005/pdf). Which further expand the normal range for a random blood pressure sample.
Take an Enalapril that helps reduce blood pressure and prevents/delays Kidney diseases
Casteism
Due to certain problems in my cranial arteries, my neurologist wants my blood pressure to be higher than that new hypertension standard. I guess I'll just have to be an outlier.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
With all of the boomers skewing the average adult age, is this really a shock?