Making use of a home blood pressure machine to record your blood pressure is easy enough but understanding the numbers you get might not be quite so easy.
Alterations to our diet and lifestyle today mean that more and more people suffer from hypertension and it is vital for us to get into the habit of monitoring our blood pressure on a regular basis. Luckily this no longer means having to head for the doctors surgery and the wide range of easy to use and relatively inexpensive monitors on sale today allows us to measure our blood pressure in the comfort of our own homes. Nonetheless, while checking our pressure might be easy enough, understanding the resulting figures is not always quite so easy.
Blood pressure varies from one person to the next and also varies according to things like what we eat and the time of day. As a result we are not able to simply say that normal blood pressure is a given reading and that if you find yourself more than so many points below or above these you should see your doctor. However, what we are able to do is to define a series of bands which signify various degrees of low and high blood pressure around a set of baseline readings that apply to the vast majority of the population and this is exactly what a blood pressure chart does.
A traditional blood chart is a graphic representation of a wide range of blood pressure readings below and above the norm with an indication of what the bands tell you about your blood pressure.
For instance, if you take a blood pressure reading and come up with a systolic reading of 133 and a diastolic reading of 87, it is quite possible that this will not mean a great deal to you, except that it may seem a little high. But, if you draw a line on a blood pressure chart joining the high number on the left of the chart and the lower diastolic number on the right of the chart you will discover that the line falls within a band that is a bit above normal and, while it is close to the borderline for hypertension, it is still within acceptable limits.
In the same way, if you recorded a reading of 152 over 96 this would be classed as a mild case of hypertension. But, the chart would also indicate that this reading in isolation should not be a cause for alarm and might simply result from taking your blood pressure early in the morning when pressure is often slightly elevated or of taking a reading shortly after eating something salty or with a high fat content.
Blood pressure charts of this nature can be very useful for giving you a snapshot of your pressure at any given moment but perhaps a better chart would be a daily blood pressure chart that is plotted over a reasonable period of time.
Many modern blood pressure monitors will store your readings and these can either be printed out and simply hand plotted on graph paper or can be used together with one of several readily available software programs to plot a colorful picture of your blood pressure over the past few weeks.
Whatever method you select there is little doubt that having a visual representation of your blood pressure readings over time can certainly make monitoring your health considerably easier.
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