What You Should Know About High Blood Pressure

Despite a new understanding of the largely preventable disease, deaths from the ‘silent killer’ are steadily climbing

Robert Roy Britt
Elemental
Published in
5 min readSep 4, 2019

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Photo: annebaek/Getty Images

HHigh blood pressure is often called the “silent killer” because its first symptoms are typically serious: a heart attack or stroke. Deaths related to the disease, also called hypertension, are on the rise in the United States at a time when the scientific understanding of the condition — and the very definition of it — is changing dramatically.

Hypertension’s death rate, adjusted for age, increased by 45% from 1999 to 2017, a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) finds. And total deaths from heart disease, stroke, and diabetes — for which hypertension is a significant risk factor — are rising as the population grows and ages. Collectively, these four so-called cardiometabolic diseases make up the single leading cause of preventable death in this country.

Between 1999 and 2011, advances in diagnosis and treatment contributed to a decline in death rates for cardiometabolic diseases. But they are no longer enough to combat the rise, the researchers say in the new study — arguing that the focus must now shift more to prevention. “Our findings make it clear that we are losing ground in the battle…

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Robert Roy Britt
Elemental

Editor of Wise & Well on Medium + the Writer's Guide at writersguide.substack.com. Author of Make Sleep Your Superpower: amazon.com/dp/B0BJBYFQCB