Tag: Blood Flow

What Happens To Your Body With High Blood Pressure?

Your Health Matters

What happens inside your body if high blood pressure is not controlled?

You’ve probably heard that high blood pressure can contribute to heart disease, stroke and kidney failure. You may understand the risk better if you can visualize what’s going on inside your body.

Simply put, when your blood pressure is high, your heart has to work harder than normal, which puts both the heart and the arteries under a greater strain.

Your heart

If you work hard lifting weights, your arm muscles will enlarge. In the same way, when the heart has to work harder for an extended time, it tends to enlarge. When your blood pressure is too high, your heart has to work progressively harder to pump enough blood and oxygen to your body’s organs and tissues to meet their needs. The heart muscle stretches and thickens, and the heart stops functioning properly. A significantly enlarged heart has a hard time meeting the demands put on it and can fail.

Your arteries

Arteries are the vessels, which carry blood throughout your body. When your blood pressure is too high, the arteries become scarred, hardened and less elastic. This occurs to some degree in all of us as we age, but elevated blood pressure speeds this process, which is called ‘hardening of the arteries’ or atherosclerosis.

Hardened or narrowed arteries may be unable to supply the amount of blood the body’s organs need. If the organs don’t get enough oxygen and nutrients, they can’t function properly. There is also a risk that a blood clot may lodge in an artery narrowed by atherosclerosis, depriving part of the body of its normal blood supply.

If the arteries that supply blood to the heart become clogged, blood flow to parts of the heart is slowed. When one vessel is completely closed off, blood ceases to flow to part of the heart, and portions of the heart muscle are damaged. This is a heart attack.

Narrowing of the arteries may also cause chest pain, called angina pectoris. Narrowing of the arteries in the legs causes cramping and pain because the tissues are not getting enough oxygen.

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Does High Blood Pressure Cause Ringing in my Ears?

Your Health Matters

Some people suffer from having a constant ringing or noise in their ears called tinnitus. Tinnitus most often comes from some damage sustained in the inner ear, usually by external sounds, but in some cases, tinnitus can be a symptom of an underlining medical cause. One such medical cause is high blood pressure.

High blood pressure can be a serious medical condition and can be the underlying cause of one of the types of tinnitus which is called pulsatile tinnitus. High bold pressure that is accompanied with ringing in your ears, is also known as hypertension, and can have many symptoms, and can also have no symptoms at all. Although hearing a ringing in the ear can be a symptom of high blood pressure, it is not a common symptom. Typically patients with high blood pressure, do not start to hear a noise in their ears until after they start taking blood pressure medication. Tinnitus can resolve itself on its own after about four to six weeks. A change in the medication can resolve the issue as well. Some individuals, who developed tinnitus due to high blood pressure, resolved the ringing after medication reduced the pressure with in the blood vessels.

Tinnitus comes in several different forms. Although pulsatile tinnitus is rare, it usually affects only about three percent of tinnitus sufferers. It is the type of tinnitus that sounds like a heart beating in rhythm with itself. It also can sound like sloshing, bumping, thumping and several other sounds. This usually occurs when a patient has a problem with their circulatory system. When a patient experiences change in the circulatory system like an abundance of blood flow or the opposite, a narrowing of blood vessels, is when pulsatile tinnitus appears and at this point is when the sounds start. One of the strange side affects is that sometimes the patient can hear the sounds in both ears, but not for all patients. It is feasible for a patient to experience more than one type of tinnitus at a time. Even so, they are independent from each other and their causes as well as the noises the patient hears are different.

There are many other causes of pulsatile tinnitus. Benign intracranial hypertension or BIH is one of the most common, and is the result of pressure being placed on the cerebrospinal fluid which baths the brain. A glomus tumor is another cause. This tumor is usually benign and can be found either in the patients ear or just below it and is due to the patient’s artery wall having a buildup of cholesterol. Inflammation or a middle ear infection can also cause pulsatile tinnitus.

When pulsatile tinnitus is caused by high blood pressure there are several options for a cure. Your physician should prescribe a medication for the high blood pressure and in most cases by getting your blood pressure under control; it usually will reduce your tinnitus symptoms. Of course if you experience any side effects from your blood pressure medication, be sure to report them to your physician.

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