How Much Of A Problem To Society Is High Blood Pressure?

The effect that high blood pressure has on society as a whole is slightly difficult to quantify. The reason for this difficulty is that no one organisation whether it be a government body or academic medical institution knows entirely and accurately the percentage of people out in society suffering from high blood pressure. All we can deal with are rough estimates and guesses taken from reasonably extensive studies.

And that my friend is really where we have to leave it. We do not have accurate information as to how many people have got high blood pressure, we have accurate information about how many people have been diagnosed with high blood pressure but that's a different figure.

So the best “guesstimate” of the percentage of the population that suffers from high blood pressure is anywhere between 10 and 20%.

Now if you take either of the above parameters you're potentially dealing with a nightmare scenario. The prospect of one out of every 10 people having high blood pressure is pretty serious but when you double that figure so that it reaches 1 in 5 (20%) then you really are looking at almost a plague of biblical proportions.

Now it has to be said that this particular point in time that there are various “variables” that we have to take into consideration but to be brutally blunt none of these might much consolation neither.

The first of these is that we have to reiterate the fact that we don't know how many people out there actually have undiagnosed high blood pressure. The second fact is a bit more quantifiable but nonetheless unpleasant in that we do know that the number is increasing because the number of diagnosed cases of high blood pressure are increasing. Now what we don't know is this. Is the number of diagnosed cases of high blood pressure increasing because our detection procedures a becoming more efficient therefore as a Society we are managing to get to a bigger proportion of the population than we ever had before or is it a global fact that the number is just increasing. My view for what it’s worth is the latter and there are little pointers here and there that are actually slowly but surely confirming this fact.

One of which is that our diet by and large in the West is appalling. Don't let anybody try and fool you or tell you otherwise but we are eating more and more processed foods and food stuffs generally in a format that we find harder and harder to assimilate. Because our tradition of sourcing foodstuffs has changed from a local to a global basis we are now eating more and more foodstuffs with preservatives added to maintain freshness and all round availability. These preservatives are really concealing a hidden side effect because by and large these additives and preservatives quiet often as a by product or side effect lead to elevated blood pressure. Therein lies the hidden danger.

We are consuming more and more of foodstuffs that are leading to elevated blood pressure added to the fact that more and more of us have undiagnosed blood pressure in the first place. Add the two facts together and therein lies the double whammy!

Is this all preventable? The answer has to be most certainly yes and with better healthcare management on a personal basis including a greater frequency of monitoring and checks ups plus a greater responsibility with regard to managing our own personal diets then we can go some way to reducing the potential of damage afflicted by this the so called “Silent Killer”.

Article Source: http://www.rightarticle.com

Stephen Morgan writes about a great many health issues on the Internet and more can be found on High Blood Pressure Symptom and at the following: www.livingwithhighbloodpressure.net/high_blood_pressure_symptom.html

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