6 Things That Affect Men’s Blood Pressure
You wouldn’t feel safe flying with the plane’s gauges pegged in the red zone. Oh, you could taxi down the runway, take off, and probably remain airborne for a spell. You might even stay up long enough to enjoy an in-flight meal. But the expectation of eventually seeing smoke billowing from the engines, or hearing shards of metal snap off, would fill you with dread.
Strange, then, that most men don’t sweat it when their body’s most important gauge–blood pressure–rises into the red zone and stays there. “High blood pressure gives you a twofold to fourfold increase in your risk of stroke or heart attack,” says Prediman K. Shah, M.D., director of cardiology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles. “And only about one-third of individuals with high blood pressure have it under some sort of control.”
The problem is, most of us mistake the early stages of hypertension for completely normal blood pressure….