Since hypertension (high blood pressure) doesn’t cause symptoms, the only way to know you have the disease is with routine blood pressure screening. Without screening, you can go about your daily life for years, feeling fine, and never knowing you face the dangers of hypertension.
Ongoing hypertension leads to serious, life-threatening health complications. Laura Fernandes, MD, FACC, here at Woodlands Heart and Vascular Institute, focuses on preventing these complications with routine blood pressure screenings. She also offers skilled care to protect your health after hypertension develops.
Here’s what you need to know about the complications that can arise from untreated hypertension.
When you have hypertension, the blood flowing through your arteries puts more pressure on the blood vessel wall than it can handle. Over time, the ongoing pressure damages the wall.
As the pressure damages the structures that make up the artery, the wall becomes less elastic and stiffens. This stiffness makes it harder for blood to flow through the artery. Hypertension also creates rough spots on the artery wall. These changes dramatically accelerate cardiovascular disease and organ damage.
Hypertension can affect any artery in your body, often causing problems in more than one blood vessel. As a result, high blood pressure has the potential to cause numerous dangerous health conditions, including:
Atherosclerosis occurs when cholesterol (and other fats, like triglycerides) get stuck on a rough spot. Without treatment, the fats keep accumulating and enlarging, inflammation sets in, and calcium joins the plaque, making it harden.
The artery gradually narrows and limits the flow of blood. In advanced atherosclerosis, the lack of blood deprives tissues of oxygen. Then tissues die and the affected organ can’t function.
The most common conditions caused by atherosclerosis include:
If you don’t get treatment, these conditions keep progressing. When the blood supply is significantly or completely blocked due to a hardened artery, or when the plaque ruptures and causes a blood clot, you suffer a life-threatening event.
Atherosclerosis is the top cause of heart attacks, strokes, chronic kidney disease and kidney failure, leg ulcers, and leg infections leading to amputations.
As your arteries harden and stiffen, your heart is forced to work harder to push enough blood through your body. The stress on your heart affects its muscles and electrical system, leading to conditions such as heart failure, irregular heart rhythms (arrhythmias), and an enlarged heart (left ventricular hypertrophy).
Constant high blood pressure is a top cause of aortic aneurysms. An aneurysm develops when a weakened area in the artery wall bulges out. The bulge keeps enlarging, potentially rupturing and causing life-threatening internal bleeding.
Narrowed arteries may limit blood flow to the brain without causing such a severe blockage that you have a stroke. But the limited supply of oxygen can still lead to mild cognitive impairment and vascular dementia.
The delicate arteries carrying blood to your eyes are also injured by hypertension. Damage to the blood vessels in the retina leads to fluids leaking under the retina and damage to the optic nerve.
The light-sensing cells in the retina can also be injured by hypertension, causing a condition called hypertensive retinopathy. Any of these eye problems can cause blurry and distorted vision and permanent vision loss.
We specialize in preventing high blood pressure and its complications. If you need to have your blood pressure checked, call the office or book an appointment online today.
