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February 2007
Home > Healthy You > Healthy You Newsletters > Healthy You on Diabetes > February 2007 > Watch Your Blood Pressure

Watch Your Blood Pressure

What you need to know to keep your numbers down

Just what is blood pressure? It’s the force of blood pushing against the walls of your arteries, as measured in millimeters of mercury (mm Hg). When your heart contracts, your blood pressure goes up (systolic pressure, or the top number on the reading). When the heart relaxes between beats, blood pressure goes down (diastolic pressure, or the bottom number). If your blood moves through your vessels with too much force, you have high blood pressure.

Just as you control your blood sugar, you need to watch your blood pressure, too. High blood pressure --also called hypertension-- tends to go hand-in-hand with type 2 diabetes. “If your blood pressure is too high, it raises your risk for heart attack, stroke, eye problems and kidney disease,” says endocrinologist Larry Merkle, M.D., of Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network

Your doctor should check your blood pressure at every appointment. But it’s important you track your blood pressure at home at least twice a week (you can find a reliable kit at your pharmacy). “The higher your blood pressure, the more often you should check it,” Merkle says. “If your numbers approach 130/80, see your doctor.”

There’s no leeway for individual differences or borderline numbers. “You can’t say 140/90 is normal for you,” Merkle says. “If you have diabetes, your blood pressure should be below 130/80, no matter what. If you can reduce it to 120/80, that’s even better."

What You Can Do for Yourself

Although your doctor may have prescribed medication to lower your blood pressure, you can help yourself with healthy habits. Merkle provides these tips:

Limit salt. Salt boosts your blood pressure.
  • Avoid adding any salt to your food and buy low-sodium products when you shop.
  • Choose foods with less than 400 milligrams (mg) of sodium per serving.
  • Limit total daily salt or sodium intake to about 2500 milligrams (about one teaspoon) a day from all sources—prepared foods, the natural salt content of some foods and the salt shaker.

Think you can’t live without salt? “Even die-hard salt fans get used to the taste of unsalted foods after a week or so,” Merkle says.

Lose weight. When you carry around excess weight, your heart has to work that much harder to keep blood pumping throughout your system. And harder pumping boosts blood pressure. You’ll be doing your heart a huge favor by shedding those extra pounds.


Get moving. “Although physical activity may raise blood pressure at first, it actually improves blood-vessel tone (and blood flow) over the long term,” Merkle says. Another bonus: It helps you lose weight! “It’s important to be physically active for 45 to 60 minutes most days of the week,” he says.

Quit smoking. "Smoking injures your blood vessels, and diabetes injures them even further," Merkle says. "When you add high blood pressure to that, you get a cumulative effect that leads straight to vascular disease." If you need help quitting smoking see the related link.

What Your Doctor Can Do for You

Your doctor has hundreds of medications to choose from to treat high blood pressure, including two major classes of drugs: ACE inhibitors (angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors) and ARBs (angiotensin receptor blockers). These medications open up and relax blood vessels by controlling amounts of angiotensin (ann-gee-o-TEN-sin), a chemical that causes blood vessels to tighten up, limiting blood flow. “We use these drugs separately and together, and they work extremely well,” Merkle says. “They don’t produce the side effects that many older medications did.”

To Learn More about kicking the salt habit, click here or call 610-402-CARE. For a set of low-salt recipes click here or call 610-402-CARE.

This page last updated 2/12/08 04:08 PM
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Lehigh Valley Hospital has campuses in Allentown and Bethlehem, Pa. and serves the Pennsylvania communities of Easton, Doylestown, Quakertown, Hazelton, Lehighton, Perkasie, Pottstown, Pottsville, Reading, Scranton, Wilkes Barre, Stroudsburg, and the Poconos and also Phillipsburg and Flemington, N.J., and western New Jersey. You don't have to travel to Philadelphia or New York for quality health care.

 
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