As everyone should know, high blood
pressure raises the risk of developing a ton of nasty complications including
strokes, heart attacks, kidney damage, dementia, and early death.
Not everyone with high blood pressure
develops those complications, however, so what would be neat to find is a way
of figuring out which high blood pressure patient is at especially high risk of
any of those complications so that they could be treated more vigorously,
perhaps, and certainly monitored more closely.
So the interesting thing is that a small
study (230 people with high blood pressure followed for 10 years) found that
people who have a significant difference in blood pressure readings between
their two arms are at raised risk of dying prematurely compared to those with
equal (high) blood pressure in both arms.
In other words, if the findings in this
study hold up in a larger one, the clean implications is that doctors and other
health care providers should be measuring blood pressures in both arms
(something that’s not done nearly as often as it should be done) and if there
is a consistent significant difference in pressure between the two arms, then
those are the people who have to be monitored especially carefully (and perhaps
treated more vigorously).
And anyone who’s monitoring their own blood
pressure at home should also take this finding as a caution to be consistent in
taking their readings in both arms.
