Prepare to have your rock-solid ideas about high blood pressure shaken to the core

Freedom for millions

If I told you that one in every three people with high blood pressure is not in any greater danger of premature death than someone with normal blood pressure, you might find that amazing–maybe even a little hard to believe.

After all, one in three, that’s a lot of patients.

But in fact, one in three is on the low side. The real number is actually quite a bit more than that.

Prepare to have your rock-solid ideas about HBP shaken to the core. And if you’re also taking blood pressure medication, prepare to shock your doctor too.

Expanding the patient pool

Complete nonsense.

Eight years ago, I used that phrase to describe a set of guidelines that created a new diagnosis called “prehypertension.”

Now, you’re probably familiar with the standard blood pressure reading in the form of a fraction: Systolic pressure, the top number, represents the pressure of the blood against the artery walls when the heart contracts, while the bottom number is diastolic pressure, or the pressure against the artery walls when the heart relaxes between beats.

Normal blood pressure is 120/80. High blood pressure is 140/90 and above. And the revised 2003 guideline stated that a BP reading between 120/80 and 139/89 should be considered prehypertension.

To really sell this new category, we were told that people with prehypertension were at TWICE the risk of dying from heart disease compared to those with normal BP

All of this came from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, so it had an “official” pedigree that opened up a huge new market for HBP drugs.

In 2003 we knew it was hogwash. And now it’s confirmed…

In a new study, University of Minnesota researchers, in collaboration with the Veterans Affairs Health Care System in Minneapolis, examined data collected on more than 20,000 subjects who participated in two major national health surveys between 1959 and 1976.

When they compared blood pressure readings and two decades of long-term survival data they confirmed something else we’ve known for years: Systolic BP is more important as we get older. But with the new data, they were able to produce these two specific guidelines:

1) People under the age of 50 with diastolic BP above 100 were significantly more likely to die prematurely, no matter what their systolic BP was.

2) People over the age of 50 with systolic BP above 140 were significantly more likely to die prematurely, no matter what their diastolic BP was.

And here’s the truly amazing conclusion from the UM team: Approximately 100 million blood pressure patients in the U.S. are unnecessarily classified as abnormal.

That’s not one in every three PB patients, that’s nearly one in every three Americans! And that’s staggering. It means that many millions of people are taking blood pressure medications and avoiding salt like it was poison for absolutely no reason at all.

The time is long overdue to toss out this “prehypertension” nonsense, stop the rush to medicate, and set millions free from their unnecessary fear of blood pressure woes.

Sources:
“Impact of diastolic and systolic blood pressure on mortality: implications for the definition of ‘normal'” Journal of General Internal Medicine, Published online ahead of print, March 2011, springer.com