The Boston University cardiologist was participating in a study at the hospital where she works, and got a readout of some of the results from the tests they had done.
“When I got home and looked at the piece of paper where they had blood pressure, I was shocked,” Benjamin told Healthline.
She bought a device to measure her blood pressure at home and confirmed that it was consistently higher than she’d hoped.
But maybe it shouldn’t have been so shocking.
Nearly half of U.S. adults have some type of cardiovascular disease, primarily high blood pressure, according to the American Heart Association’s latest annual update of statistics.
Benjamin headed the committee charged with writing that report, which was released last week.
She might not have figured she’d be a statistic, but that’s probably true for a lot of people.
The definition of high blood pressure, or hypertension, was changed in 2017 from a reading of 140/90 mm Hg to a reading 130/80 or higher.
And with Americans already struggling with high prevalence of heart disease in previous years, the realization that even more of them are at risk is leading to calls for new, more coordinated action.
That’s led to some controversy and confusion, but that doesn’t mean those with blood pressure between 130 and 140 weren’t already facing health risks.
“We based the hypertension numbers on cardiovascular disease risk, and compared to 120/80, 140/90 gave us a twofold increase in risk, which we thought was unacceptable,” Dr. Robert Carey, who co-chaired the committee that wrote the new guidelines, released in 2017, told Healthline.
So, they lowered the definition to account for those dangers.
“We didn’t predict this when writing the guidelines,” Carey, a professor of medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, said of the AHA finding that nearly half of adults have heart disease. “But if you expand the hypertension numbers, then you would expect this kind of result.”
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