High blood pressure
Diagnosis and treatment
Blood pressure and heart rate change constantly and are also subject to sudden fluctuations. This is quite normal and also makes sense, because in this way the body can quickly adapt to changing exertion levels. For example, to be particularly capable of responding physically in an emergency, your pulse or blood pressure will need to increase within seconds. Slight variations in blood pressure (unstable blood pressure) are for this reason healthy and normal. This, though, does make the assessment of individual blood pressure values more difficult. If examinations take place only now and then in the doctor’s office, or even at home using self-measurements, they can lead to premature conclusions – after all, one is usually tense in this situation.
Of course, this stress also contributes to possibly increased measurements, meaning that this increase in blood pressure is caused by the situation. One prerequisite for a diagnosis of high blood pressure is that the blood pressure be permanently elevated even while at rest.
This disease comes in different forms, each of which is treated differently. To differentiate between the forms, long-term (24-hour) blood pressure monitoring is absolutely essential.
It is also interesting in this context that only 6% of hypertensive patients in Germany receive adequate treatment.
