If you have hypertension (high blood pressure), there’s virtually no chance you’ll know. People with hypertension are blissfully unaware they have a life-threatening disease damaging their arteries.
Dr. Laura Fernandes and our Woodlands Heart and Vascular Institute team know first-hand about the challenges of blood pressure. Not just because we’re cardiology experts, but also because many patients seeking help for symptoms like chest pain are surprised to learn they have advanced hypertension.
This blog post discusses why you won’t recognize hypertension, the symptoms that you may develop, and how to protect your health.
There’s one reason you won’t know about high blood pressure: It doesn’t cause symptoms.
Hypertension begins with mildly high blood pressure and gradually worsens. As the disease progresses, it damages your arteries while never giving you a hint something is wrong.
Without treatment, high blood pressure progresses through three stages. It takes many years, even decades, to go from elevated blood pressure to hypertension stage 1, then hypertension stage 2. Throughout each stage, most people never have symptoms.
In severe cases, hypertension can reach a fourth, life-threatening stage called a hypertensive crisis. Even then, symptoms don’t appear in 75% of people.
So, when might symptoms appear? Symptoms don’t come directly from high blood pressure. Instead, the first signs arise from the the health complications it causes.
High blood pressure damages arteries throughout your body, causing numerous health problems. These conditions are also progressive. Once they begin, they keep getting worse.
Like hypertension, symptoms from health complications only appear after they reach an advanced stage.
The problems most likely to cause symptoms include:
CAD occurs when atherosclerosis (cholesterol plaque in the artery wall) blocks the arteries carrying blood to your heart. As the fatty plaque enlarges, it increasingly limits the blood supply.
Eventually, enough blood is cut off to cause chest pain, fatigue, dizziness, and shortness of breath. Unfortunately, for many people, the first symptom of CAD (and hypertension) is a heart attack.
In addition to causing CAD, hypertension contributes to heart disease by making your heart work harder. The stress can cause cardiomyopathy (weak heart muscles), heart failure (the heart can’t pump enough blood), and heart arrhythmias (an irregular heartbeat).
Symptoms of these conditions include:
PAD develops when atherosclerosis develops in the leg arteries. The earliest symptom is leg pain that occurs when walking but improves when resting. As the disease progresses, you may have leg numbness, tingling, and nonhealing ulcers.
Renal artery stenosis is atherosclerosis in the arteries serving your kidneys. This condition damages the kidneys, causing chronic kidney disease. As the kidney damage worsens, you may have symptoms like foamy urine, swollen ankles and feet, and dry, itchy skin.
High blood pressure affects the delicate arteries in your eyes, damaging the retina. As retinal damage progresses, you experience blurry vision and eventually, vision loss.
Hypertensive retinopathy is a red flag that high blood pressure has damaged other arteries in your body.
Tinnitus causes ringing and other sounds in your ears. Pulsatile tinnitus occurs when you hear the pulse of your heartbeat in your ear. Pulsatile tinnitus is uncommon, but hypertension is a common cause when it develops.
You can prevent high blood pressure if you catch it while it’s elevated but not yet high enough to be stage 1 hypertension. After the disease develops, early treatment can stop it from progressing to an advanced stage.
Since you won’t have symptoms, routine blood pressure screenings are the only way to prevent or identify and treat hypertension.
The American College of Cardiology recommends that adults older than 40 have their blood pressure checked yearly. Adults aged 18 to 39 should get screened every 3-5 years.
Your primary care provider monitors your blood pressure during routine physical exams. We also offer preventive screenings.
We check your blood pressure, evaluate your risk for hypertension, and recommend the steps you can take to prevent blood vessel problems.
Call Woodlands Heart and Vascular Institute or use online booking to schedule a blood pressure screening.
