By: Eric Metcalf
A lot has changed in the past 10 years: It’s much easier to watch videos over the computer. A new President is in office. Pluto is no longer considered a planet.
But some things have remained the same during the past decade, like the number of American adults who have high blood pressure.
In a February issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers compared statistics on high blood pressure that were collected in national surveys between 1999 to 2002 and 2005 to 2008.
In the earlier period, about 28 percent of American adults had high blood pressure (also called hypertension). The numbers didn’t improve over the following years. In the more recent period, hypertension was particularly high in people ages 65 and older (it affected 69.7 percent) and non-Hispanic blacks (it affected 38.6 percent).
Roughly 30 percent of people with hypertension weren’t taking medication for it. Groups that were especially unlikely to be treating their hypertension with medicine included young adults and people who didn’t have health insurance.
However, there is some good news. The number of people with hypertension who were treating it with medication actually increased since the earlier period. And a significantly larger percentage of people had gained control of their high blood pressure.
If you’d like your blood pressure to be at a healthier level 10 years from now, here are some good ways to start:
- Ask your health care provider to measure your blood pressure.
- Ask if it’s too high.
- If you’ve had a diagnosis of high blood pressure, ask your health care provider if you’re controlling it well enough.
- Ask if you can do anything to improve your blood pressure on your own, such as changing your diet or doing more physical activity.
- If your health care provider recommends that you start taking a medication, ask about any side effects and learn all the important information you can about the medicine while you’re at your visit.
- Keep using the medication. Many people stop taking their blood pressure medicine for various reasons. If you are having trouble sticking with it – perhaps it costs too much, or you have to follow a confusing regimen – ask your doctor for help solving the issue.
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