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Hola!
Today, we shall be looking into a well known yet very well ignored disease which affects the entire body, slowly, silently but surely. As you would have guessed, it is HYPERTENSION. This will also form the first of a series of topics on how to care for your heart. However, before I go into more details, let me make an analogy to help us better understand. Segun, Chioma, Haruna, listen!!!

Imagine you have a farm that has a well with a pump with multiple rubber tubings from large caliber to smaller ones supplying water to your farm for proper irrigation so your farm so the plants do not die. The pump needs to work well to generate enough pressure to the tubes, which then supplies a good and sufficient amount of water to your farm making you have viable plants that will produce good fruits for your harvest, or else your farm will become poorly irrigated and your plants will see premium shege. This farm is your body, the tubings are your blood vessels and the plants are your body organs. What hypertension does in the simplest sense is that it makes the inner layer of those rubber tubings stiff (hyper-tense – you get the logic, yeah?), so they lose that elastic property that allows them to take in more water to distribute to other parts of the farm (your body). Another unique feature of hypertension is that the blood vessels, asides from being stiff also try to compensate by increasing the amount of the middle layer of the blood vessel (the muscular layer. There is also the deposition of what we call atheromatous plaques in the lining of the blood vessels, thus narrowing the lumen of the affected vessels. This means the pump has to do more work to push the same amount of water out. The only difference between the pump and your heart is that the heart can enlarge (not out of love now but out of stress) to generate the needed pressure to push out the same amount of blood that the body needs. Initially this adaptation of the heart is beneficial but in the long term, the heart cannot keep up with the stress and will often fail.

But the heart failing is just one of the many complications that can arise from long-standing hypertension. Some organs are heavily dependent on a constant volume of blood and any reduction in that volume due to a narrowing of those vessels will ultimately lead to organ dysfunction. One of such organs is the brain, which can develop a stroke if the blood pressure is too high. Also the heart too suffers as blood is the life of the heart and indeed, every organ, but if the heart doesn’t get enough blood due to thickened/occluded vessels from long standing hypertension, asides the heart failing as I mentioned earlier, it can cause what we call Ischaemic heart disease, the one commonly known as heart attack. The kidneys can also start developing a decline in function, known as kidney injury. Virtually all organs that needs blood can get affected.

Now, I am sure Damilola, Oghenekevwe and Hamzat are asking “What exactly causes this hypertension?”. Haha, just hold on, we are getting to that. But first, go and drink a cup of water 😉.

For the majority of individuals, they have what we call Essential Hypertension. This means that there is no identifiable cause of the hypertension. In a small subset of of individuals, there is an identifiable cause which if taken care of, the blood pressure will return to normal. The causes of secondary hypertension, that is hypertension due to an identifiable cause, can range from diseases of the kidneys, of the heart or of the blood vessels themselves. And presently, there are research studies that show that hypertension may run in families, so it can be hereditary.

That is as much as we can cover in our article today. Next month, we will be looking at myths concerning hypertension, habits that perpetuate the disease, what normal blood pressure is and what to prevent or manage hypertension.. Till then, çiao!