Specific traits, conditions, or habits might increase your chances to develop hypertension called high blood pressure risk factors.
13 Hypertension Risk Factors
Many of the below said hypertension risk factors can be modified by adopting a healthy lifestyle.
- Overweight or Obesity – if the body mass index (BMI) is between 25 to 30 kg/m3 is considering as overweight and if the BMI is more than 30kg/m3 is considering as obese. Excess weight increases your risk of developing high blood pressure. Therefore, lose weight until you reach a healthy weight. Obese people are two to six times more likely to develop high blood pressure.
- Unhealthy diet - especially high carb, high sodium and low potassium diet. Too much of refined carb & sodium and too little of potassium tends to raise your blood pressure. On the other hand, reducing sodium and raising potassium can lower your blood pressure. Avoid packed and preserved foods, because they contain large quantities of sugar, refined carbs, sodium salt, and chemicals.
- Alcohol use - drinking too much alcohol tends to raise blood pressure, anything less than one to two drinks of alcohol per day is considering ok.
- Lack of physical activity – tends to develop obesity and high blood pressure.
- Smoking – can harden/stiffen (lose elasticity) the arteries and lead to elevated blood pressure.
- Stress – situations make the adrenalin gland to secrete more adrenaline hormones. Also, long lasting stress makes the body practiced to this excess adrenaline, in due course leads to elevated blood pressure.
- Certain Medicines - Non-steroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs (NSAIDs) such as Ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin, Ibuprofen) can worsen or develop high blood pressure. Additionally, it causes damage to the kidneys, worsens heart failure, and increases heart attack or stroke risk. A cough and cold medicines containing decongestants such as pseudoephedrine and phenylephrine can raise your blood pressure and heart rate by constricting your arteries, not only those in your nose. Birth controls pills contain a synthetic mixture of hormones estrogen and progesterone; these hormone can raise your blood pressure.
- Certain chronic conditions - may increase your risk of high blood pressure, they are diabetes, kidney disease, and sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder characterize by stop breathing for a while (10 and even up to 30 seconds) during sleep. Hormone-replacement therapy can induce elevated blood pressure in some individual.
- Low in Vitamin D - can lead to high blood pressure. Researchers suggest vitamin D may affect an enzyme made by your kidneys raises your blood pressure. Exposing to the rising sun for about 10 to 30 minutes is the easy, safe, and economical fix for this problem.
- Aging – greatly increases the likelihood to develop high blood pressure, especially elevated systolic readings, this is mostly due to hardening of arteries due to aging.
- Family history – hereditary play an important role towards high blood pressure; it appears to run in families. It might be most likely due to the unhealthy lifestyle that is carried over to the next generation.
- Gender - men have an increased chance of developing high blood pressure than women.
- Prehypertension or gestational hypertension – those who have already diagnosed as hypertension or having had high blood pressure during pregnancy, are more likely to develop hypertension than normal individuals.
Aging, family history, gender, and prehypertension/gestational hypertension are the risk factors that cannot be modified called unchangeable or non-modifiable hypertension risk factors. Other risk factors can be reduced with some consistent healthy lifestyle changes called changeable or modifiable hypertension risk factors.