Hypertension In Young Adults

Recently in Nigeria, autopsy reports revealed that the late Goldie died as a result of HYPERTENSION. Prior to this, my boo had just been diagnosed as well with having high blood pressure. In his case I was so worried, for the fact that he is young and should not be having increased blood pressure. We thank God, that’s over now.

The rate at which young people all over the world are being diagnosed with high blood pressure is alarming. I just thought it right to educate everybody that this article can reach on the symptoms, causes and treatment for high blood pressure.

I hope this article provides insight in any way, also please feel free to add to whatever might be missing.

Thanks guys! And yeah I'm back to blogging!! Whoop!!

What exactly is HYPERTENSION?

Hypertension is such a silent disease that you can be walking around with a blood pressure reading of 180/100mmHg and not be aware of what is going on internally. If you have a blood pressure reading of 120/80, 120(the figure above) represents the systolic pressure which is the pressure of blood hitting the artery walls when the heart beats. Eighty (the figure below) represents the diastolic pressure which is the pressure between heartbeats.

The normal blood pressure rate is less than 120/80mmHg, so hypertension is when either the systolic measurement is 140 or higher or the diastolic measurement is 90 or higher. There are basically two types of hypertension: Essential and Secondary Hypertension

The Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention, Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (JNC 7) guidelines categorize hypertension as follows:

• Normal. Less than 120/80
• Prehypertension. 120-139/80-89
• Hypertension. 140/90
• Stage 2 hypertension. 160/100

What causes HYPERTENSION?

The cause of Essential Hypertension is unknown (Yeah!! No known cause). Although lifestyle factors such as obesity, sedentary lifestyle, and excessive alcohol or salt intake contribute to the condition.

Secondary Hypertension in most cases is as a result of an underlying kidney disease, hormonal imbalance, and drug intake

According to the JNC 7, half the adult population is prehypertensive or hypertensive, and because blood pressure increases with age, most people will become hypertensive if they live long enough

Daniel Lackland, DrPH of the American Society of Hypertension says “Younger adults with high blood pressure typically have high diastolic pressure while older adults have high systolic pressure”.  In young adults, the diastolic pressure rises because the heart is pumping harder while in older adults, the systolic pressure rises and stiffens arteries. Hypertension in young adults is caused by increased body mass, with an increase in African-American men, but it affects men of all races."

Signs &Symptoms

In most cases, hypertension doesn't give signs or signals the affected individual. It is usually discovered during a routine health screening. Below are some of the signs of Hypertension:

·         Headaches (usually at the back of the head     and noticed in morning)
·         Light-headedness
·         Vertigo(the feeling that you or your environment is moving or spinning)
·         Tinnitus (buzzing sound in the ears)
·         Altered Vision
·         Fainting Spells



What can be done?

For young people in the pre-hypertensive stage and hypertensive stages, modification of lifestyle activities plays a major role in bringing down the blood pressure.

Worry Less!! Manage Emotions!!

Let’s be honest, has worrying ever changed a situation for the better?? No it has not. Manage emotions such as anger, worry, rage, annoyance as they have been linked to causing physical and biological changes.

Weight reduction

 A Body Mass Index (BMI) of above 24.9 should be cause of worry in any young adult whether male or female. It is advised to maintain a normal body weight with a target (BMI) of 18.5 to 24.9. According to JNC7, for every 10kiliogrammes of weight lost, the systolic blood pressure reduces by approximately 5-20.

Adjust your Diet

 Ensure your diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy products with a reduction in saturated and total fat. When this is done, the systolic blood pressure is expected to reduce by 8-14 points.

Reduce your salt intake

Salt is an essential mineral that a body needs to stay hydrated. Ingestion of salt is usually followed by water retention which is the body’s way of staying hydrated. With the consumption of ‘too much salt’ the body is likely to become over-hydrated as a result of excess fluid in the body. The excess fluid causes the kidney to work extra to remove this fluid. 

Excess body fluid also causes an increase in blood volume which requires the heart to work harder to move all that blood around, thus blood pressure goes up. 

Reduction in daily salt intake to less that 2.4g/1 teaspoon per day would reduce the systolic blood pressure by 2-8 points approximately.

Engage in Aerobic Activity

Engage in regular physical activity, such as brisk walking, at least 30 minutes per day most days of the week. This can decrease systolic blood pressure by 4-9 points.

Reduce/ Moderate Alcohol Consumption

Limiting the amount of alcohol to between 11 and 14 grams of alcohol is expected to result in a reduction in systolic blood pressure by 2-4 points.

Without treatment, a man at [age] 30 could be facing end-stage renal disease, stroke, or heart attack."

Some Risk Associated with Hypertension

Young adults with hypertension often have what's called "Metabolic Syndrome" which is known to contribute to heart disease and diabetes. It includes a cluster of risk factors found in an individual and include excess body fat (especially around the waist and chest), high cholesterol, and insulin resistance. Snoring has also been linked to high blood pressure in young adults. Erectile dysfunction has also been linked to complications of untreated high blood pressure.

Source: Wikipedia, WebMD, Yahoo Health
Photo Credit:Google Images

Dieting, Eating Disorders, and Obesity in America

By Maria Rainier- Guest Blogger

I received a note in my mail box this morning that my insurance company would be raising my premium because between 2007 and 2009, the number insurance carriers in my state who received obesity surgery went up 55%.

How is it that the nation claiming the most lives to eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia (218 deaths annually by the most recent study) is also known as the fattest nation on the planet? The answer is a four-letter word.
Diet. Rather, diet-ing.

The Birth of the Dieting Nation
In a nation with a high-stress daily environment, minimal exercise, and fatty foods, the logical solution is to restrict food intake and increase exercise in order to be what the media (in bed with the diet industry) finds sexually attractive and successful. The American diet industry makes close to $40 billion annually selling pills, foods, cookbooks, how-to guides, fitness DVDs, clothing, exercise machines, and hoaxes.

These profits didn’t exist in the early 1980s before the burst of media flaunting rail-thin models with abnormally large (surgically- or Photoshop-enhanced) breasts and hunky muscle-men. Is it a coincidence that obesity became identified as an epidemic later in the ‘80s?

The Dieting Nation Gains Weight
If you approach a clinician at a treatment center for disordered eaters—commonly believed to be anorexics, bulimics, and other “skinny” eaters—they will tell you a little-known truth: dieting is the greatest trigger of eating disorders. In fact, upwards of 50% of individuals enrolled in dieting programs suffer from BED, or Binge-Eating Disorder.

The logic for this is simple: if you tell yourself you cannot have any “bad” foods (which happen to be yours and all of America’s favorite comfort foods like chocolate, ice cream, bread, pasta, and fried chicken), you will crave “bad” foods all the more. When you tell a child not to have any cookies from the jar, you will find that the child has eaten all of the cookies. Geneen Roth, Good Housekeeping columnist and renowned speaker, first felt she would have a problem with her weight when her mother refused to let her have a second creamsicles, “or you will get fat.” Thus, from age 11 to 28, she cycled through diets and innumerous eating disorders, losing and re-gaining a total of over a thousand pounds.

“Diets are so incredibly seductive because they seem like [they work at first] . . . [and] they are thrilling experiences when they work. If only I could fix myself, I could manage to stay on a diet.” The truth is, however, that they rarely work: 95-85% of people on diets gain the weight back or more within 3 years, and these failed dieters contribute to the obese population, which, in America, stands currently at 73% of our entire population of 307,006,550.

“For every diet,” Roth warns in every speech she holds or book she writes, “there is an equal and opposite binge.”

How We Pay
The consequences of obesity are often deadly: hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. The problem with eating disorder research in America, however, is that it is conducted on mostly white communities by white researchers, which feeds the myth that eating disorders are a plight of well-off, college-age Caucasian girls. The myth of African Americans and Latin Americans being immune to disordered eating not only skews statistics but blocks an individual’s road to health. Today, the media pressures people of all races and walks of life to be inhumanly slender and proportioned, fit and beautiful.

Moreover, eating disorders are not limited to “skinny” disorders; they in fact most often result in obesity. By definition, an eating disorder is any habitual kind of eating conducted not to nourish the body but to comfort or fill it, fueled by compulsion and/or emotion. If the statistic mentioned above included all eating disorders and not just “skinny” disorders, the number would be staggeringly higher than 218 deaths per year.

How to Stop
The answer is not to diet. That’s what got us here in the first place.
The answer is to eat what the body needs and desires rather than what we have trained our minds to want. Your body doesn’t feel good after eating that donut because that donut has zero nutrients in it. Your mind wants it, however, because we have trained ourselves to eat comfort foods when we need comforting. Much of Americans’ eating is fueled by compulsion. We must find what is driving our compulsion—insecurity, doubts about our jobs or marriages, stress at work, etc.—and eat to fuel rather than comfort our bodies.

Telling ourselves, “No, you can’t have that,” is the surest way to binge on it later. We must educate ourselves and our children about nutrition and make peace with our inner and bodily selves.

Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education, researching various online degree programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop