|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Every two out of 10 individuals have high blood pressure. The causes are varied — high-stress levels, obesity, diabetes, smoking, alcoholism, sedentary lifestyle, high salt intake, etc. But lifestyle modifications can help lower blood pressure and prevent the risk of cardiovascular diseases
The causes for high blood pressure are varied with the most prominent being high-stress levels coupled with obesity, diabetes, smoking, alcoholism, nil physical activity, chronic kidney diseases, family history, extremely high salt intake and also certain nutritional deficiencies like calcium, potassium, magnesium and vitamin D deficiency. More than 33 per cent of
individuals are not even aware that they suffer from this condition.
The age group is varied. It could be as young as 25-30 years of age to
50 years and above. The symptoms are very vague. Individuals with very
high blood pressure can experience throbbing headaches, fatigue,
irregular heartbeats, dizziness, nausea, breathing problems and chest
pain.
Lifestyle modifications are a must in order to lower the blood pressure. Following are a few guidelines that will not help lower blood pressure and also prevent the risk of cardiovascular diseases and obesity.
Also exercise is a must.
So practising activities like yoga will prove extremely beneficial.
The benefits of yoga are innumerable. It decreases the pulse rate,
boosts immunity, balances energy levels, maintains weight, improves
sleep, regularises heart beats, enhances concentration and memory,
reduces stress and lowers the blood pressure.
Exercise helps make the heart stronger, especially high-intensity or power yoga. Therefore, a stronger heart will take lesser efforts in delivering blood to the vital organs of our body thus lowering the pressure or force on the arteries. Yoga asanas like the camel pose, breathing exercises like anulom-vilom, kapaal-bharti and shavasan or the corpse pose, pranayama and meditation should all be included in your daily regimen. Prevention The best option is to
prevent hypertension, rather than curing it. Hypertension can be
prevented by following the below:
The major culprit behind most of the diseases including hypertension is stress. If you could find a way in managing stress you can prevent 90 per cent of the disorders. If you follow the above guidelines to lower blood pressure it would help prevent the risk of cardiovascular diseases and also help you become resistant to hypertension symptoms and thereby combat it. — The writer is one of the leading holistic health gurus and has a health portal www.mickeymehtahbf.com
More heart attacks happen in winter
Social media photos affect risky teen behaviour Teenagers who see friends smoking and drinking alcohol in photographs on social networking sites are more likely to indulge in such behaviour themselves, says a new study led by Thomas Valente, at the University of Southern California (USC). Valente and his team surveyed 1,563 10th-grade students between October 2010 and April 2011 about their online and offline friendship networks and the frequency of their social media use, smoking and alcohol consumption. The researchers found that the size of one's online network of friends was not significantly associated with risky behaviour. Exposure to friends' online pictures of partying or drinking, however, was significantly associated with both smoking and alcohol use, researchers said. Students who responded to the survey were distributed across gender and on average 15 years old. The study was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health. A possible remedy for dementia Austrian scientists have discovered a natural remedy which could play an important role in the treatment of dementia. The scientists from the University of Graz, who worked in conjunction with researchers from the Free University of Berlin, said the substance "spermidine" stimulates the breakdown of "cellular scrap", Xinhua reported citing ORF, the Austrian public broadcaster. This should aid with memory loss problems, a major symptom of dementia. Spermidine is found in all body cells, though its concentration decreases with age. The compound aids in the breakdown of defective proteins and other damaged cellular components. The researchers conducted tests on fruit flies, where it was established that the older flies who had been administered spermidine had much better memory abilities. Given that fruit flies and mice have memory processes similar to humans, the researchers hope the positive results can be adapted to the treatment of dementia in humans. Active men have low risk of heart failure Physical activity decreases the risk of sudden cardiac death (SCD) in men with low cardio-respiratory fitness, says a new study. The research was by Dr Jari Laukkanen, who investigated the impact of high leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) combined with cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) on risk of SCD. It included 2,656 randomly selected men (42 to 60 years) from the Kuopio Ischemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study. He added that the study showed that exercise training and high leisure-time physical activity may be especially important in individuals with low cardio-respiratory fitness. Autistic kids can outgrow difficulties related to auditory and visual cues Scientists have shown that high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children seem to outgrow a critical social communication disability — integrating the auditory and visual cues associated with speech. John Foxe, Ph.D., professor of paediatrics and and director of research of the Children's Evaluation and Rehabilitation Centre at Einstein, said that it suggests that the neuro-physiological circuits for speech in these kids aren't fundamentally broken and that they may be able to do something to help them recover sooner. In the study, 222 children ages 5 to 17, including both typically developing children and high-functioning children with ASD, were tested for how well they could understand speech with increasing levels of background noise. The study has been published online in the journal Cerebral Cortex. — Agencies De-activating nerves in neck can lower BP
The team has already conducted a small human trial of the technique, with results expected at the end of this year. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is referred to by the World Health Organisation as one of the world's biggest silent killers. It affects around one in three people worldwide. Treatment needs to be lifelong and many patients are able to manage their condition with anti-hypertension drugs. But experts say that for around 1 in 50 of them, medication does not help. Julian Paton, who led this study at Bristol's school of physiology and pharmacology, said while scientists already knew of a link between the carotid organs and hypertension, but until now they "had absolutely no idea that they contributed so massively to the generation of high blood pressure." Normally, the carotid body acts to regulate the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood. It is stimulated when oxygen levels fall in the blood — such as when someone is holding their breath. This then causes a dramatic increase in breathing and blood pressure until blood oxygen levels are restored. Having established that this response comes about through a nerve connection between the carotid body and the brain, Paton's team decided to block the nerve endings in the neck and found that it swiftly brought their blood pressure down. — Reuters
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
O
Our heart functions
efficiently to pump blood via the arteries to all organs of the body.
It can only work effortlessly if the pressure in the arteries is
maintained. Blood pressure is hence the pressure or force exerted by
the flow of blood on the walls of the arteries. Higher the blood
pressure, harder will the heart have to work in order to supply blood
to the body. Persistent high blood pressure will lead to a condition
known as hypertension. Normal blood pressure reading is 120/80. A
reading between 120/80 and 139/89 is known as a pre-hypertensive stage
whereas anything above 140/90 means that the person is suffering from
hypertension.
The first step
should be weight loss in case you are overweight or obese, with
regular cardio and endurance exercises like jogging, brisk walking,
swimming, climbing stairs, cycling etc
A new study has found
that the risk of getting a heart attack increases with decrease in
temperature. By means of a multivariate analysis, researchers revealed
that acute myocardial infarction (AMI) was strongly dependent on
temperature. It was found that AMI increased by 7 per cent for each
10° C decrease in minimal temperature. An analysis of 15,964 AMI
patients revealed a significant positive correlation between AMI and
air pollution and an inverse correlation between AMI and temperature.
A potential mechanism to explain the increased risk is the stimulation
of cold receptors in the skin and therefore the sympathetic nervous
system, leading to a rise in catecholamine levels. Moreover, increased
platelet aggregation and blood viscosity during cold exposure promotes
thrombosis and clot formation.
LONDON: Scientists
experimenting with rats have found that de-activating certain nerves
in the neck can effectively treat high blood pressure - a discovery
that could be an advance in tackling one of the world's biggest silent
killers. Researchers at Britain's Bristol University found that in
rats with high blood pressure, when they removed nerve links between
the brain and the carotid body — a nodule about the size of a grain
of rice on the side of each carotid artery — the animals' blood
pressure fell and remained low. The results were published in the
journal Nature.