have you ever wondered why blood pressure is so important I mean this is a vital that is checked during nearly every visit with a healthc care provider and besides giving us some important information on the current status of the cardiovascular system blood pressure or at least high blood pressure is known as a silent killer because over time if left untreated it can increase your risk of stroke heart attack kidney failure and even aneurysms So today we're going to Define what blood pressure is the numbers you want to have have how to measure it and things that you can do to keep it at healthy levels so let's jump right into this anatomical and physiological awesomeness so before I show you some really cool things on this body I want to start by saying that blood pressure like many other processes in the human body follows the Goldilocks principle you don't want the blood pressure too low and you don't want the blood pressure too high you want it just right or just enough enough to profuse the tissues throughout the body with enough blood if it's too low these tissues won't get enough oxygen and if it's too high or at least too high for an extended period of time that increased pressure can literally damage the tissues and even damage things like blood vessels which can lead to other health conditions that we'll talk about in a little while now you may have experienced a temporary decrease in pressure to say like your brain when you stand up too quickly and get a little laded but overall the vast majority of people deal with too high high of blood pressure rather than with too low and we call high blood pressure hypertension but when it comes to understanding blood pressure we need to realize that blood is a fluid and fluids exert pressure on the walls of the container that they fill like how water in a hose would exert pressure on the walls of the hose or water in a balloon would exert pressure on the walls of the balloon so blood pressure is the force of the blood pushing against the walls of your arteries as the heart pumps blood throughout the body so if you look at the drawing over here on the White board you can see as the blood is pumping through the artery it's also going to exert pressure on the wall of that artery and the equation for blood pressure is blood pressure equals cardiac output times systemic vascular resistance cardiac output is the amount of blood pumped out of the heart per minute which is influenced by heart rate and how forcefully the heart contracts with each beat and in general as cardiac output goes up so does blood pressure systemic vascular resistance is the amount of resistance created by the blood vessels throughout the body we could spend a lot of time on systemic vascular resistance but think of this resistance being influenced by the tone of the blood vessels like how constricted or how relaxed the smooth muscle is in the arterials generally more constriction increases blood pressure the length of the blood vessels also influences vascular resistance and blood pressure as well as the compliance of the blood vessels and what I mean by compliance is if you look at at this aort and you can see me poking it and just bouncing up and down on the aort you can see that it recoils and that's what I mean by compliance arteries have elastic connective tissue built into the wall and so if the blood gets pushed into an artery that's healthy and is compliant that artery will stretch but it won't just stretch once the blood gets pumped into it after it stretches it will recoil and what that does is it'll shoot the blood further Downstream and that's free and what I mean by free is that it doesn't require any extra ATP or any extra work by the heart it's easier on the heart to pump into a nice stretchy compliant artery think of the opposite like a diseased or atherosclerotic artery that's stiff and non-compliant and the Heart tries to pump into that you don't get that stretch and recoil and so overall that will be harder on the heart and will increase blood pressure and this is one of the many reasons why you want to have healthy arteries you often hear about the link of cholesterol and plaque build up in the arteries yes plaque building up in the arteries can occlude and block the arteries and sometimes those plaques can rupture and travel further Downstream and cause all sorts of different problems but it also can stiffen the arteries and make them less compliant again potentially raising blood pressure and with all this talk about blood pressure I want to mention something that helps to take some pressure off of me and that's the sponsor of today's video grammarly as a medical provider anatomy and physiology teacher and with running our education team here at the lab I'm constantly working across Ross multiple platforms such as Google Docs slack canva as well as addressing a lot of emails so in other words I have a lot of writing to do and I want to ensure that my writing is clear professional and impactful and this is where grammarly comes in grammarly is my AI writing partner that helps me get my work done faster with higher quality writing and again what sets grammarly apart is that it works where I work across over 500,000 apps and websites which means no more copying and pasting unlike other AI tools for instance I use grammarly to help me generate an outline for a video script on Google Docs and once I'm ready to post on YouTube or Instagram I use grammarly's rewrite feature to help me condense my captions which helps make some of my content creation so much more efficient in streamlined grammarly also has 15 years of best-in-class communication Ai and provides personalized writing suggestions based on my audience goals and context it's trusted by tens of millions of professionals and 96% of users users report that grammarly helps them craft more impactful writing and here's one of the best parts grammarly is free to use and try out so sign up and download it for free using my link grammarly.com ioha thanks again to grammarly for sponsoring today's video and now let's get back to blood pressure now I'm sure all of you have had your blood pressure checked at some point in your life and blood pressure is measured in Millers of mercury and recorded with two numbers systolic pressure which is the top number represents the pressure in your arteries when your heart beats the second number or the bottom number is the diastolic pressure and represents the pressure in your arteries when your heart rests between beets and so for example if your blood pressure is 120 over 80 120 is the systolic pressure and 80 is the diastolic pressure and so where do you want your blood pressure to be for normal blood pressure you would want your systolic pressure to be less than 120 and your diastolic pressure to be less than 80 elevated blood pressure is a systolic reading between 120 to 129 and a diastolic less than 80 stage one hypertension is when systolic is between 130 and 139 or diastolic between 80 and 89 stage two hypertension is when systolic is 140 and above or diastolic is 90 or higher now it is very important that you measure the blood pressure properly because obviously we want the numbers to be as accurate as possible and the proper way to measure blood pressure is to have the person relax sitting in a chair feet on the floor and back supported for at least 5 minutes before taking the reading you also want to avoid caffeine exercise and smoking for at least 30 minutes before taking the measurement as well as to ensure that the bladder is empty so you'd want to use the restroom prior to taking your blood pressure also the patient and the Observer should not talk during the rest period or during the measurement and the arm should be supported like maybe resting on a desk by their side now sometimes all of these steps don't always occur in a clinic and this could be due to the type of clinic or the reason why someone is at the doctor's office for example I work in Urgent Care it's a pretty fast-paced environment where we don't manage long-term conditions such as hypertension we're managing urgent conditions and often patients are sick or injured and so this can temporarily Elevate the blood pressure and so in some of these cases we may take those mild elevations with a grain of salt but in a family practice or Primary Care setting where one of the main goals is to assess blood pressure those steps should be followed and if you are doing blood pressure readings at home you should also follow those steps so why do we really care about blood pressure and why should you be motivated to keep it at a healthy level well as I already implied at the beginning long-standing untreated hypertension can lead to other more serious health conditions and the reason why it is nicknamed the silent killer is because hypertension is most asymptomatic the only time people really ever feel symptoms is when hypertension becomes severe with numbers of like 180 for systolic and or over 120 for diastolic and even then sometimes people may only feel a mild headache but again even the long-term unmanaged stage one or stage two hypertension can lead to problems with the heart over time the heart becomes overworked and this could potentially lead to heart failure I also mentioned earlier that high blood pressure can Dam damage the blood vessels and the reason for this is think of high blood pressure as creating a mechanical type of damage to the inside lining of the blood vessels this makes it easier for plaque to build up in the arteries and if this plaque builds up in a coronary artery that feeds the heart this could eventually lead to a heart attack or if it was plaque building up in a coted artery that feeds the brain this could potentially lead to a stroke the kidneys are also very susceptible to unmanaged hypertension the microvas musculature the small blood vessels in the kidney can get damaged leading to kidney disease and potentially kidney failure I also mentioned aneurysms at the beginning of the video high blood pressure is a risk factor for developing an aneurysm and an aneurysm is an abnormal bulge in an artery and if this aneurysm is in an artery that is in the brain and this aneurysm bursts this could cause a hemorrhagic stroke so enough of the gloom and doom what can you do to lower your blood pressure well if you've watched our channel before it's probably not going to be a shock that I'm going to mention exercise exercise has many benefits for your heart and cardiovascular health but it can also lower blood pressure I mean technically your blood pressure goes up during exercise but we're talking about the overall long-term effect that this has on your overall blood pressure and consistent exercise can lower this aerobic exercise combined with resistance training can decrease systolic blood pressure by about 4 to 6 mm of mercury and diastolic olc pressure by about 3 mm of mercury now 4 to 6 points may not sound like a lot but this Improvement is independent of weight loss so if you don't lose any weight at all and you just add exercise you can improve by four to six points the stolic and three points with diastolic but if you also were to lose weight Studies have shown that blood pressure can decrease from about 0.5 to 2 mm of mercury for every kilogram of body weight that is lost and a kilogram is about 2.2 lb for us non-metric people now obviously this depends on the person and how much weight they have to lose but that's a pretty impressive Improvement many people can also get improvements with reducing the amount of sodium in their diet with a potential overall decrease of about 4.8 systolic and 2.5 diastolic the DASH diet which stands for the dietary approaches to stop hypertension has also helped people to improve their numbers this diet is high in vegetables fruits lowfat dairy products whole grains poultry fish and nuts and is also low in sweets sugar sweetened Beverages and red meats and because of the types of foods incorporated in this type of diet people consequently ingest foods that are rich in potassium magnesium calcium protein and fiber but low ins saturated fat total fat and cholesterol limited alcohol intake also has been linked to better blood pressure numbers as women who consume two or more alcoholic beverages per day and men who are consuming three or more drinks per day have a significantly increased incidence of hypertension compared with non-drinkers so it is recommended that adult men with hypertension if they are going to drink consume less than two drinks per day and for women with hypertension that would be no more than one drink per day now I do want to mention that the numbers I quoted for the amount that you can decrease your blood pressure with these lifestyle modifications came from up to- date which is a medical database that compiles a whole bunch of different research studies and this is what many medical providers will reference when treating their patients but keep in mind these numbers can vary from person to person but even though there can be variation it is recommended that almost everyone who has elevated blood pressure stage one or stage two hypertension that they all participate in these lifestyle modifications because if you can't get the blood pressure under control with these lifestyle modifications then we get to move on to medications now personally I'm one of those who tries to avoid medications if I can but I do need to say that there are definitely situations where medications are appropriate sometimes just based on uncontrollable factors like age and genetics you can only get your blood pressure so low with lifestyle modifications so again there are situations where managing hypertension with medications is recommended because the alternative for having long-standing unmanaged hypertension is not something that we want to deal with later in life thank you so much for watching today's video everyone we truly appreciate all the support you give this Channel and hopefully we give you guys some valuable information that you can use in your everyday life and if you're interested in learning more about like cardiovascular health we have a video about how the heart changes with exercise and if you want to check out grammarly we've got that link in the description below and we'll see you in the next video