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Watch VideoDr. John helps keep your high blood pressure under control
Story By: Dr. John
Source: AP
If you're among the millions of Americans with high blood pressure, listen up. There's one thing you need to do to help keep it under control.
It's easy, experts want you to buy one of these and check your own blood pressure at home.
Right now around 100,000,000 Americans have high blood pressure. This includes those that are taking medication and keeping it under good control and those that aren't watching it very closely. The problem is that not only can high blood pressure be hard to keep under a good control, but without control it can lead to plenty of health problems.
And it's called the silent killer because things might seem to be going well, but if your blood pressure is high, it's working behind the scenes to set you up for a heart attack, stroke or kidney failure later in life.
So now the American Heart association, the American society of hypertension and the Preventative Cardiovascular Nurses' Association have joined forces and are recommending that anyone and everyone with high blood pressure, even if you think it's under control, buy a home blood pressure monitor and use it at the same time every day.
When you get your blood pressure checked at your doctor's office, the numbers that show up aren't always accurate. We call it the "white coat syndrome" which makes most peoples blood pressure go up when they see a white doctor's coat or just step into their doctor's office. So since this reading isn't very reliable and is only done a few times a year, these experts want you to measure your own blood pressure at home and bring the results in with you to your next doctor's appointment. That way you both get a better idea of where your true blood pressure stands.
