I’ve been sort of fighting borderline high blood pressure on and off and a few questions came to mind recently.
I’ve read your article on blood pressure and listened to your podcasts on the topic but the questions remain. Sorry in advance if some of these are a little naive: 1. Do we know what influences systalic or diastalic blood pressure more? Made up example: salt intake has more influence on systalic blood pressure
2. Do we have a rough idea of how long lifestyle changes take to have an effect on BP (assuming they do)?
3. Do we know why systalic readings tend to be higher in older adults?
4. Do we know whether the heart/blood vessels can recover to some extent from damage due to high BP if it is subsequently brought back down to good levels?
5. I live in Europe and use this chart from stridebp.org: https://www.stridebp.org/home-pdf/ to check for validated monitors (european models) and bought an Omron M3. Is this a good source for checking validated monitors? As always, thank you for all the content you put out and thanks in advance for your reply.
Different people have different mechanisms of hypertension, which we are not always able to identify/differentiate in practice. Some may be more sensitive to sodium intake, others less so, even with the same degree of hypertension.
Blood pressure responses to these interventions tend to be relatively quick; we often see improvements on the order of days to weeks.
This is mainly thought to be related to arterial stiffening.
This is difficult to answer succinctly. I would argue the better question is not focused on “damage to blood vessels”, but rather on actual risk of cardiovascular events like stroke, heart attack, aortic dissection, etc – and the risk of these things can be markedly lowered by bringing blood pressure back down to normal ranges.