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Why High Blood Pressure is Bad for You

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Your doctor will easily tell you that living with uncontrolled high blood pressure is an easy way to invite death, to put it bluntly. That is because high blood pressure has a high capacity to do damage to your health. It causes such harmful damage by gradually wearing out critical organs of the body and, in many cases, causing them to fail. When such critical organs begin to fail in their functions, the body system is imperiled and could easily fail.

Experts are worried about high blood pressure not only because of the immense damage it has the potential to inflict on health, but also because it's easy to fail to realise that such harm is being done. High blood pressure may show no symptoms to the victim. Most times it won't show any noticeable symptoms. That is why a large segment of the population will live with it without realising they are victims, until it does considerable damage to their health. For this unique characteristic, high blood pressure has been dubbed "the silent killer". When sudden death occurs as a result of high blood pressure, it's often the case that the victim was not aware that he or she already had a problem with the blood pressure. Not knowing that one has high blood pressure, or knowing but failing to take action to control it, is a lot of health risk.

Here are major health risks you will face if you have elevated blood pressure and fail to take urgent steps to get it under control:

• Damage to the heart - there is a major risk of heart attack, heart failure or sudden cardiac death. Also chest pain, enlarged left heart and other heart diseases.
• Damage to Arteries - hardening and thickening of arteries that can cause obstruction of blood flow, raising the risk of heart and kidney failures or stroke or bulging of artery wall that can rupture and cause high-risk internal bleeding.
• Kidney Disease and Failure - by damaging the large arteries leading to the kidney and its tiny blood vessels, the kidney gets incapacitated, leading to failure; rupture with life-threatening internal bleeding also possible.
• Stroke - High BP can cause severe damage to the brain's blood vessels and lead to serious narrowing, bulging or rupture, with brain bleeding that results in a stroke.
• Brain Damage - Damage to arteries can starve the brain of much-needed blood flow, causing damage that can result in impairment of speech, reasoning, memory, reading, motion and other cognitive functions - dimensia.
• Vision Loss - The eyes are not spared and damage to their blood vessels puts the retina at risk of damage with danger of impaired or lost vision. The optic nerve may be damaged too, causing bleeding and possible loss of vision.

All said, high blood pressure is a life-threatening condition and has many new cases of stroke, cardiovascular problems and death to its credit each passing month of the year. Untreated and uncontrolled high blood pressure will progressively cause damage to the key organs of the body, ultimately raising the likelihood of these life-threatening health conditions. Unfortunately, high blood pressure is a silent disease. A victim may be unaware of its presence, even for years, while the damage continues. This is possible because high blood pressure can exist without presenting any health symptoms. Detection, in that situation, is only possible through a BP check.

Simply put, you can't afford to toy with high blood pressure, because it's a killer and a silent one. That's what makes it even more dangerous. If you have it, treat and control it. And keep treating and controlling. If you don't know your status, check it. And keep checking!