Friday, June 09, 2006

You may have Hypertension

You may not even know that you have hypertension. It is important to catch it early for the sake of your health.

It is recognised that stressful situations can increase the blood pressure; if a normally normotensive patient has a high blood pressure only when being reviewed by a healthcare professional, this is colloquially termed white coat effect. Since most of what we know of hypertension and its outcome with or without modification is based on large series of readings in doctors' offices and clinics (e.g., Framingham), it is difficult to be sure that white-coat hypertension is not significant. Ambulatory monitoring may help determine whether traffic and ticket inspectors produce similar sustained rises.

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