Many factors distort blood pressure reading: report

More often than not, patients and even nurses and doctors are skipping steps that help paint an accurate portrait of someone's blood pressure -- how someone sits and positions their arm, whether they just had a cup of joe or chitchat with their practitioner during the measurement, and other factors can produce readings that are higher or lower than normal blood pressure.

"To really make a dent at improving people's cardiovascular health, we need to screen and treat people for hypertension, but we need to do it correctly," Tammy Brady, a pediatric nephrologist at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore who studies blood-pressure measurement and cardiovascular health in children and adults, told The Wall Street Journal. "Getting the right reading is important for preventing heart attacks, strokes and other potentially fatal conditions," noted the newspaper, Xinhua news agency reported.

What does it take to get the reading right? The patient should sit with both feet on the ground, legs uncrossed, back straight and arms supported on a table or other surface, according to guidelines from the American Heart Association and other organizations. "A cuff should be positioned over your bare arm at the level of your heart. You shouldn't talk or scroll on your phone while it is being measured, and your bladder should be empty. And you should take your blood pressure at least a couple of times in a sitting," added the report.

Meanwhile, last month, research published by experts from an international academic collaboration led by the University of Sydney and University College London suggested that doing five minutes of physical activity, such as walking uphill or stair climbing every day may help to lower blood pressure. According to the study by the Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting and Sleep (ProPASS) Consortium, replacing sedentary behavior with 20-27 minutes of exercise per day can result in a clinically meaningful reduction in blood pressure.

"High blood pressure is one of the biggest health issues globally, but unlike some major causes of cardiovascular mortality, there may be relatively accessible ways to tackle the problem in addition to medication," Emmanuel Stamatakis, joint senior author and Director of the ProPASS Consortium from the University of Sydney, said. "The finding that doing as little as five extra minutes of exercise per day could be associated with measurably lower blood pressure readings emphasizes how powerful short bouts of higher intensity movement could be for blood pressure management."

The research team analyzed data from 14,761 volunteers to see how replacing one type of movement with another is associated with blood pressure. The team estimated that replacing sedentary behavior with at least 20 minutes of exercise daily could reduce cardiovascular disease incidence by 28 percent. The World Health Organization estimated that 1.28 billion adults aged 30-79 years worldwide have hypertension, consistent elevated blood pressure, and that 46 percent of adults with hypertension are unaware they have the condition.

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