HYPERTENSION Q&A

What is secondary hypertension?: Secondary hypertension is when a direct cause for high blood pressure is identified. There are many different causes of secondary hypertension, and among those reasons kidney disease ranks highest. Hypertension is also triggered by tumors or abnormalities which cause the adrenal glands – which are the small glands that sit atop the kidneys – to secrete large amounts of hormones which elevate the blood pressure. Birth control pills that contain estrogen can boost blood pressure, as can medications that may constrict blood vessels.

What is essential hypertension and how does it affect the human body?: An oft overlooked but just as deadly disease, essential hypertension affects millions of Americans in the United States though many do not take any action until it is too late. In as many as 95% of reported high blood pressure cases within the United States, the underlying cause has not been determined yet by researchers and physicians. As such this type of high blood pressure has come to be known as essential hypertension.

While essential hypertension has remained somewhat mysterious, it has been linked to certain mitigating risk factors. Genetically, high blood pressure tends to run in families as a hereditary trait and is more likely overall to affect men than women. Both age and race also play a role as well, as statistics show that in the United States, blacks are twice as likely as whites to develop high blood pressure – however, that gap begins to narrow around the age of 44. For women, after age 65, black women have the highest incidence of high blood pressure as reported by physicians and the American Medical Association.

Essential hypertension is also influenced in large part by diet as well as lifestyle. For example: the link between salt and high blood pressure has been shown to be compelling and does more to prove the rule than disprove that there is a substantive link between salt and high blood pressure. In a study done in the Pan-Pacific region, people having found to be living on the northern islands of Japan eat more salt per capita than anyone else in the world, thus they have the highest incidence of essential hypertension out of any other region or race. In contrast, those people who add no salt to their food show virtually no traces of essential hypertension within their system.

For the most part, the majority of those people with high blood pressure are salt sensitive, which means that anything more than the minimal nutritional dose of salt is too much for them and increases the blood pressure. Other mitigating factors that have often been associated with essential hypertension also include diabetes, obesity, stress, insufficient intake of calcium potassium, and magnesium, a general lack of physical activity as well as chronic alcohol consumption or abuse.