What are the Causes of High Blood Pressure?
As a first step, let’s talk about your heart.
Your heart is an organ that is mostly muscle tissue. It is a pump. In very simple terms its job is to receive incoming blood from the body that is low in oxygen and pump it to the lungs.
As it passes through the lungs the blood gets rid of carbon dioxide and picks up oxygen. Then the blood goes back to the heart and the heart pumps the oxygen rich blood out to the entire body.
Blood flows through arteries going out from the heart to various parts of the body, and through veins on the way back to the heart.
The heart pumps blood by the rhythmic contraction of the four chambers in the heart. It is the strong contractions of the lower two chambers (called ventricles) that pumps the blood out of and away from the heart to the various parts of the body.
There is a great deal of pressure created by the contraction of the ventricles. and it is this pressure that pushes the blood through the miles of arteries within the body.
It is the pressure, the force of the blood pushing against the inside walls of your arteries, that is being discussed when we talk about blood “pressure.”
What do the numbers mean?
You’ve probably heard the sound of a heart beating at some time. It sounds sort of like: lub-DUB, lub-DUB, lub-DUB, lub-DUB.
The “lub” is the sound of the auricles beating and pumping the blood into the bigger, more powerful chambers, the ventricles. The “DUB” is the sound of the ventricles beating, and pumping the blood away from the heart (see the above illustration).
When the powerful ventricles contract (the “DUB”), that is the moment of greatest pressure called the “systolic pressure.”
Between one “lub-DUB” and the next “lub-DUB” is a moment when the heart is not beating at all, that is the moment of lowest pressure called the “diastolic pressure.”
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