Why is hypertension referred to as the "silent killer"?
Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is a disease of consequences, not symptoms, says Walter J. Koroshetz, MD, director of the NINDS. Here, he explains how high blood pressure affects your body and future health.
Transcript
Hypertension itself doesn't cause symptoms but consequences.
So hypertension is basically high blood pressure. So with each beat of your heart, the blood is pumped out of the heart into the blood vessels.
And so that's going to cause an increased pressure in the blood vessel when that blood hits the vessels.
There are no symptoms, there are consequences. And the consequences are heart attack, stroke, renal failure.
And then we think also cognitive impairment when you get elderly. But those things happen 20 years after the hypertension started.
So by the time you have symptoms, that the blood vessels are in bad shape already. And it's pretty hard to go backwards.
It's much easier to prevent this problem in the blood vessels than it is to repair. And we don't have a good way of repairing this kind of damage
hypertension
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