According to new information provided by Dr. Gary Gibbons, director of NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, blood pressure can and should go as low as possible. He has also called this potentially lifesaving information. A study has been going on called the Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial, and it has shown that lowering blood pressure as much much as possible in people ages 50+ will lower the risk for stroke significantly. This was of such importance to Gibbons, that he announced the results of the study earlier rather than wait til the trial was finished.
HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE IN OLDER PATIENTS
Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is almost a guarantee when you are dealing with a patient that is 50+. There are actually 1 out of 3 adults living with high blood pressure in the Unites States. The people living with hypertension are living with their blood pressure currently have numbers 140/90 and higher. The normal bp for someone is 120/80 or lower. The treatment for hypertension patients in the past has been to get the systolic, or top number of the bp, down to at least 140 for healthy adults. The recommendation for people that are suffering from diabetes or kidney disease is to get the bp down even lower to at least a nominal rate of 130.
THE SPRINT STUDY
The Sprint Study, also known publicly as the Systolic Blood Pressure Intervention Trial, has been running since 2009. This study has included 9,300+ participants ages 50 and older to the present date, with a mean age of 68. It was an extremely diverse study, including the elderly, and both male and female participants of the population. The study’s control was a systematic division in demographics, which separated people into different groups based on different goals of lowered blood pressure. The participants were significantly surprised to find out how the vast and incredulous difference they saw in the patients in the group with the lower blood pressure goal, and found that it not only helped with the heart and kidney diseases, but it saw better health results all around. Such experiments will hopefully further our pursuit of more successful methods for reducing blood pressure.
