Has your doctor told you that your blood pressure is too high and then started quoting numbers to you like ‘140 over 90’ and it should be ‘120 over 80’. You give the doctor a strange look but the doctor didn’t explain what the numbers meant... or you have just heard blood pressure numbers mentioned in general conversation and wondered what they meant.
Well... the first number, which is always the higher number, is the systolic blood pressure reading. Now let’s say it is 140, which is a pressure of 140 millimetres of mercury and refers to the pressure that your heart pumps blood or the blood pressure when the heart is contracting and squeezing the blood out.
The second number, which is always the lower number is the diastolic reading and refers to the resting blood pressure or the blood pressure when the heart is relaxing between heartbeats.
Millimetres of mercury is a standard of measurement, and at the risk of putting you to sleep is defined as ‘the pressure exerted at the base of a column of fluid exactly 1 millimetre high, when the density of the fluid is exactly 13.5951 g/cm3, at a place where the acceleration of gravity is exactly 9.80665 m/s2.
To you and I millimetres of mercury has no practical meaning other than a reference point to what your ideal pressure should be. You are considered to have high blood pressure when the systolic reading is above 140 millimetres of mercury and a diastolic reading above 90 millimetres of mercury. A typical adult is considered to have optimal blood pressure when the readings are 120 over 80.
What Are The Symptoms of High Blood Pressure
The thing about high blood pressure is there are usually no symptoms until your blood pressure becomes dangerously high and you start to experience symptoms like severe headaches. High blood pressure is referred to as the silent killer because until you have it tested and get those numbers, you are usually not aware that your blood pressure is high, and it could have been high for a long time with you being unaware that anything was wrong.
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