Many times, there are no obvious high blood pressure symptoms at all. In fact, high blood pressure, aka hypertension or simply HBP, often goes unnoticed until it has advanced to severe degrees and begins causing damage to various bodily systems. That’s why it is often referred to as the Silent Killer. Left untreated, high blood pressure can cause a person to have significantly higher probabilities for coronary heart disease, heart failure, stroke and kidney problems and/or failure.
Hypertension is defined when the resting pressure is consistently 140/90 or higher. Any reading that is consistently between 120/80 and 140/90 is classified as pre-hypertensive. Being in the pre-hypertensive or hypertension category increases your risk of cardiovascular disease, peripheral artery disease, aortic aneurysms, kidney failure and other life threatening health problems.
Blood pressure is the force with which your blood is flowing through your veins and arteries. It is expressed as the ratio of your systolic (when the heart beats, or pumps blood) pressure and your diastolic (when the heart is between beats) pressure. Your body raises these numbers when under stress, to ensure that blood is flowing to all the parts of your body that need to react to the stressful situation.
When the heart grows weak, it is unable to pump blood hard enough to pass it on to the lungs or the other parts of the body. Heart failure does not mean a complete cessation of the heart, but it is one of the leading causes of death in the United States.
Too many of us dismiss the symptoms of high blood pressure as being unimportant or explain them away as being caused by something else. If we are suffering from one or more of these symptoms we should seek urgent medical advice before our condition becomes worse and causes further damage to our health.
You can take your systolic and diastolic readings at home with a wrist or arm cuff made precisely for this purpose. You can also monitor your readings with the machine at your local pharmacy. Of course, if you are having high blood pressure symptoms that seem very worrisome or extreme, or if your readings are in a dangerous zone, then you should call 911 or immediately go to the local emergency room to be checked out.
A gradual process in which the heart begins to work less efficiently increases the risk of heart failure . A second type of hypertension called secondary hypertension may spur some potentially fatal ailments like adrenal gland tumors, inflammation of kidneys, renal vascular narrowing, renal failure, periarteritis nodosa and Wilms’ tumor.
There are other signs and symptoms that are associated with high blood pressure. Generally, these are caused by other conditions that can lead to high blood pressure. The signs and symptoms include muscle cramps, excessive perspiration, frequent urination, weakness, and rapid or irregular heartbeat or often called palpitations. In rare cases, blood pressure rises quickly which results in malignant or accelerated hypertension.
There may be no symptoms of mild and moderate hypertension for many years. But the patient may suffer from some symptom like pain in the back of the head and neck while walking in the morning. This pain disappears very quickly. A patient may suffer from aches and pains in the arms, leg and back and in the shoulder region, suffer from palpitation, frequent urination, nose bleeding, fatigue and nervous tension, pain in the heart region, tiredness and emotional upsets.