What is high blood pressure?

To understand high blood pressure, or hypertension, it’s important to know how the heart works.

When you’re healthy, your heart pumps blood throughout your body, delivering nutrients and vitamins to your organs. This helps them to stay healthy and do their jobs.

Inside each of your blood vessels, the heart’s pumping action puts pressure on the blood to push it. This moves blood through your blood vessels.

Blood pressure measures how hard your blood is pushing against these blood vessel walls.

Measuring blood pressure

When you get your blood pressure checked, you’ll see two numbers. Let’s use 120 70 as an example. The number on top (120) measures blood pressure when the heart pumps. The number on the bottom (70) measures blood pressure when the heart rests.

For most people, if your blood pressure is higher than 130 80, you have high blood pressure.

The effects of high blood pressure

The higher your blood pressure, the more force is pushed against your blood vessels’ walls. This causes damage, and damage can happen anywhere in the bloodstream. Over time, high blood pressure can damage the blood vessels and eventually cause a heart attack, heart failure, a stroke, kidney failure or eye disease. High blood pressure doesn’t have symptoms, so it’s important to check it regularly.

High blood pressure risks

Common risk factors include:

• Elevated blood pressure: Between 120 80 and 129 80 .
• Diabetes
• Obesity
• Pregnancy
• Genetics and family history: High blood pressure can be passed from generation to generation.
• Age: Your risk increases as you get older.
• Your sex: Women are nearly as likely as men to have high blood pressure.
• Race or ethnicity
• Being inactive
• Eating too much sodium or not enough potassium
• Drinking alcohol too often
• Using tobacco

You can still have high blood pressure, even if you aren’t at risk. If you have high blood pressure, you can work with your primary care physician or other health care providers to control it. Check out these tips to help reduce your risk.

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