High Blood Pressure And Cholesterol: What Women Need To Know

Dr. Kahlon:
When understanding healthy blood pressure and cholesterol women need to know that a normal blood pressure is any blood pressure which is 130/80 or below. That means top number has to be 130; bottom number has to be 80 and that is the highest number you should always have. If there is any number higher than that, that is high blood pressure.

So if your blood pressure is lower than that number than that’s normal. And for cholesterol, your total cholesterol has to be 200 at the most, or less than that, and there’s a further break down in good and bad cholesterol which basically in relation to women the good cholesterol has to be more than 45 mg/dl and bad cholesterol has to be less than 130 mg/dl.

If you are diabetic it has to be less than 100, which is a little bit too much detail for a patient to understand but these are very easily reproducible numbers and can be searched online.

Every woman should know about high blood pressure and cholesterol’s effects on your overall health. High blood pressure is a very common disease which is usually one of those diseases which has very serious consequences but is not symptomatic. It does not really produce any symptoms. So if you are hypertensive or that means you have high blood pressure, there is no way to know unless you actually check your blood pressure.

It’s also good to take a step back and see exactly what is happening when you have high blood pressure. Your heart is beating 80 times per minute in an average human being and when the heart is beating against that high pressure it has to work harder. So you can imagine for this heart to beating 80 times a minute against this pressure which is more than normal. So eventually it will cause your heart to get thicker because it has to generate more force to overcome this pressure and makes your heart muscles thicker, and similarly that stress is transmitted throughout your vascular system – that is your arteries and your artery’s branches in aorta and which causes slow damage to your body, and that produces injury to the lining of the arteries and which makes those lining of the arteries more susceptible to develop blockage later on.

Similarly, cholesterol, which is a normal part of human constitution, it’s very important substance which exists to develop hormones in our body. We need cholesterol and our body makes cholesterol; it’s not only diet source but it’s made by our liver, but excessive amount of cholesterol, especially the distribution of different components of cholesterol predisposes us to get heart disease because if heart artery lining is damaged already from let’s say blood pressure or smoking or diabetes, cholesterol tends to deposit in those areas and cause the blockages to develop, or the word ‘plaque’ is used to describe that blockage and at some point that blockage gets narrow enough that it will have a top of it kind of torn by high blood pressure and exposing the underlying lining causing the blood clot to form.

So this process of slow injury and then build up of cholesterol and then tearing of the cholesterol cap and forming a blood clot is what is slowly leading to heart attack. So if somebody has a heart attack today they were injuring their arteries more than 10-12 years ago. So if somebody was able to go back 12 years ago and correct their blood pressure, correct their cholesterol, this whole progression to injury will be delayed significantly. It may not be completely prevented, but it can be delayed significantly.

So that’s what our goal is and that’s what a goal of a person who is listening to this now is to make sure that their blood pressure is normal now and if it is not normal, to treat it with weight loss, diet change or medications. Similarly, that their cholesterol is normal; if not, change it with diet and your modification of exercise program and a medicine if needed, so that you can prevent the long-term damage to your whole vascular system that is arterial system.

About Dr. Jaskamal Kahlon, M.D.:
Dr. Jaskamal Kahlon is Board Certified in Cardiovascular Diseases, Echocardiography, Interventional Cardiology and Internal Medicine. He completed his Fellowship in Cardiovascular Medicine and Internal Medicine Residency at the St. John Hospital and Medical Center, Fellowship in Interventional Cardiology at Emory University and his Residency in Cardiology.

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Tags:

• High Blood Pressure
• High Cholesterol