What Is High Blood Pressure? -- An Overview
Blood pressure is the amount of force (pressure) that blood exerts on the walls of the blood vessels as it passes through them. As blood is pumped from your heart into your blood vessels, enough pressure is created to send it to all other parts of your body. As blood vessels travel away from the heart, they branch off and gradually get smaller, just like the branches of a tree. One branch may go to the brain while another may go to your kidneys. Blood pressure keeps the blood flowing through all these branches so that your body's cells get the oxygen and nutrients they need and waste matter can be removed.
As you might have guessed, high blood pressure (also known as
hypertension) develops when the pressure within your blood vessels is too high. About 1 out of every 3 American adults -- nearly 65 million people -- has high blood pressure.
If a person is diagnosed with high blood pressure, it doesn't mean that he or she is "too nervous," overanxious, or obsessive. This is a popular myth. High blood pressure is not nervous tension. In fact, many people who are perfectly calm have high blood pressure.
What Is High Blood Pressure? -- Types of High Blood Pressure
There are a number of different categories of high blood pressure.
Most people have what is known as essential hypertension or primary hypertension. This is high blood pressure where the cause is not known. Other types of high blood pressure include:
- Preeclampsia (also known as pregnancy-induced hypertension, toxemia of pregnancy, or acute hypertensive disease of pregnancy)
- Eclampsia
- Chronic hypertension
- Chronic hypertension with preeclampsia
- Late hypertension (also called gestational hypertension).
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