What is Hypertension? Hear from a Lee Health Heart Institute Interventional Cardiologist

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Hypertension is a very common prevalent problem and somebody who's 50 years old, his chance of having hypertension in his lifetime is about 90%. We call it a silent killer because [music] patient feel fine even when they have blood pressure. That's why they bother not even to measure it and it causes a lot of morbidity, mortality meaning a lot of problems with the patient's health as well as in reducing their survival.

[00:00:25]Weight loss is very important to bring the blood pressure down even without taking medications. [music] Eating less salt and more legumes and vegetables and fish. That diet has been shown to reduce blood pressure and sodium intake is very important. If people have if they have high blood pressure, they have to cut down their salt intake to between 2 and 3 grams which helps bring down their blood pressure again without adding medicines. Activity [music] helps in losing weight as well and also works directly to lower your cholesterol and and that also helps. I think we get the best bang for our buck by treating controlling blood pressure.

[00:01:01]Controlling blood pressure will reduce your [music] chance of having a stroke which is very disabling by 50% and reduce your chance of having congestive heart failure by 30% and reduce your chance of having a heart attack by 30%.

[00:01:12]So we get real return. The blood pressure medications are much safer.

[00:01:16]They don't cause that many side effects and most of them have become generic so affordable. So it's important that people take their blood [music] pressure seriously. If they don't take their blood pressure seriously, it's silently damaging their heart, their brain and their kidneys. Ideal blood pressure is 120 over 80 >> [music] >> and 130 over 80 we we call stage one hypertension and 140 over 90 stage [music] two hypertension. They need to be treated. So anybody's blood pressure more than 130, we need to bring it down initially by those things we talked about diet, activity, low salt diet, losing weight and taking care of sleep apnea and then [music] if that doesn't work, they have to go on medication. So first set of things we call a lifestyle modification.

[00:01:57]>> modification.