Low Blood Pressure Can Have havea Big Impact on Your Health
Hypertension Contention
Blood Pressure: Low equals “slow”
Aside from the fact that there’s no evidence that high blood pressure causes heart disease (it’s often a response to the condition, but not its cause), and the fact that salt intake is only remotely correlated to hypertension, there’s one more widespread myth about blood pressure that most people – and their doctors – don’t seem to know about:
Your blood pressure can be TOO LOW (115/75 is borderline, if you ask me).
Research from Israel shows just how big of an impact low blood pressure can have on health – especially upon those who are getting up in years. According to a recent Reuters online article, a Ben Gurion University study showed that patients over 70 with what modern standards call “mild hypertension” actually thought more clearly and creatively than those with lower blood pressure.
Both men and women in the nearly 500-subject study whose blood pressure was deemed high enough to warrant treatment with prescription drugs – and also those with clinically uncontrolled (untreated) hypertension – performed significantly better on tests of cognitive function, memory, concentration, and visual retention. Only in tests of verbal fluency was there no meaningful scoring advantage for the high-BP group.
Those with “normal” blood pressure tested the worst of all three groups in the study.
Similar studies in younger test populations yielded no difference in performance based on blood pressure. What’s this mean? It means that physicians need to balance their efforts to control what they perceive as risk factors for heart disease (namely, BP over 115/75) with patients’ quality-of-life concerns – like mental sharpness and creativity.
In other words, they should stop meddling with the body and mind and let it find its own equilibrium. But the over-medication of senior citizens isn’t just limited to the treatment of hypertension.
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Keep reading
Drug-induced emergencies twice as common as left-handedness
I’ve long lamented the needless over-prescription of all kinds of drugs to American senior citizens – and with the pharmaceuticals industry’s merciless marketing of their poisons to aging baby boomers, there’s no end to the trend in sight.
But is drug-company targeting of conditions likely to be suffered by seniors actually causing more illness than it helps to cure? I think so. But a recent study shows just how prevalent drug-induced medical problems really are. According to the research, fully 20% of all emergency department visits are senior citizens suffering drug-related side effects or interactions.
That means you’re twice as likely to end up in the ED because of your medications as you are to be left-handed!
Why is this happening? Often, it’s because physicians don’t know enough about how the ever-growing array of drugs interact with one another, so they prescribe them in error. This is especially prevalent in cases where patients have more than one doctor (a very common occurrence nowadays).
Also, the complexity of adhering to medication schedules can contribute to confusion over dosages or accidental overdoses – especially in the case of elderly patients with multiple medications (also quite frequent in this day and age). One study identified 2.2 million cases of seniors taking more than the recommended dosages of their medications.
The solution to this over-medication of the elderly is three-fold: First, fewer doctors treating each patient (and better communication between them if there must be more than one). Second, better education of doctors about drug interactions and side effects. And third
FEWER DRUGS BEING PRESCRIBED!
What are the odds of all these things happening? A lot slimmer than the 1 in 5 chance the average senior has of ending up in the ED because of problems with their drugs.
Never “slow” about letting you know,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
