too often are now told they have LUTS, which manages to sound like something you may actually enjoy getting).
.....And then there’s the tactic of simply lowering the bar at which people get diagnosed with a chronic condition, as for example, ADHD in adults and several hormone “deficiency syndromes” such as hypothyroidism (low thyroid hormone levels but no symptoms of low thyroid levels yet).
.....All of which brings me back to hypertension, a prime example of that latter trend to lower the bar for diagnosis, because what’s happened with blood pressure levels over the last two decades is that the definition of “high” has gradually gone down for many people.
.....So it used to be simply that if your BP was under 140/90, you had “normal” blood pressure, but if your BP reading was over 140/90 on three separate occasions (a strong reminder, by the way, that you should never accept a single high blood pressure reading as a true measure of your average blood pressure), you were told you had “high blood pressure”, although you weren’t always treated – and certainly not always with medication - for blood pressures slightly higher than that magic 140/90.
.....But then, like my now-jailed accountant (don’t worry, he should be out in less than four years, although he may ask to stay in longer because the place is so full of his pals), “they” started playing with the figures because studies find that the complications related to high blood pressure (strokes, heart attacks, kidney failure, and many others) happen more often and at lower blood pressures in certain people, so these days, “high” BP kicks in at 120/80 for higher-risk groups such as people with diabetes, for example.
.....The interesting thing, though, is that for the rest of us, since the experts now agree that we should all keep our blood pressure as low as possible (so long as the blood pressure doesn`t produce symptoms such as light-headedness), some experts are now pushing a new “condition” called pre-hypertension, which refers to a blood pressure between 120/80 and 139/89, which hugely expands the number of people who now have a blood pressure
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