I also have been checking my levels a little obsessively, unsuccessfully trying to find ways to drop them. And like you, I noticed that I spike during cold weather. I’m probably particularly sensitive because I have very low body fat.
This has dramatically improved/disappeared under the medication listed above.
If you have symptoms like Raynauds and POTS (note that POTS can be hard to demonstrate, so may be less convincing to a doctor) then Amlodipine or similar may be helpful. If you take it and you feel lightheaded when standing up, or have trouble with exercise or fatigue, you probably don't need it and it isn't good for you.
You may have more consistently high blood pressure rather than transient spikes if you don't have POTS, or if you don't react immediately to cold temperatures. In that case an angiotensin blocker like Telmisartan may help. It can take weeks to become effective, vs Amlodipine should show effects in just a few days.
If you have high blood pressure then just telling your doctor you want Amlodipine or something will probably be enough- convincing insurance will be harder. Amlodipine can be used off-label for Raynauds. If you don't have particularly high blood pressure and haven't systematically tried to exclude causes it will be harder to convince your doctor. They might let you try it for a bit to see if it helps, and the generic isn't too expensive.
There are a lot of different blood pressure medications (like a ridiculous array of options) and I let my doctor decide. There are side effects but I have suffered zero of them, and now that the blood pressure is under control my bloodwork across the board has been improving significantly.
One extra pill to take at night does not make a huge change to my nightly routine of taking all my drugs. So taking one less pill wouldn't be a huge improvement, either.
But the lack of availability and much higher cost of the combined drug means that I don't ever want to do that again.
If the drug is taken with food (when drug absorption is highest), some folks will develop edema in their legs for several hours.
It came and I was sure it was defective because it kept measuring 170+ / 120+, which seemed impossible. A few days later I stopped by a pharmacy with one of the big units, and it read the same thing. So I visited my doctor.
He put me on 5mg of amolodipine and it did very close to nothing. Then it was upped to 10mg and still little benefit. It was the addition of telmisartan that completely changed everything for me. The effect was overwhelming.
It's hard for me to really identify the symptoms because I lived with it, I suspect, for many years. It was my norm. I will say this: at my current blood pressure I constantly feel way more relaxed, physically. Like my body doesn't feel in a constant fight state.
For the record, my blood pressure is not nearly as high, but its typically 140/85 as infrequently measured. I’ve never measured during a migraine, but I will now.
One strange thing: In the past I'd get auras and then not long after an enormous headache. I still occasionally get auras...but then it just resolves and the day goes on normally. Very strange.
Been on Olmesartan since then and couldn't be happier
After doing a bit of research I got myself a monitor, and sure enough my readings one between 150-170/90ish. I'm also a type 1 diabetic to add to it.
Wait what? explain more please.
PT is the one thing so far that I haven't been able to get fixed with the four different high blood pressure medications that I'm currently on.
Potassium relaxes the walls of the blood vessels. It's a counterbalance to sodium.
Doctors will say 3.5 is fine, but there are several studies demonstrating that as you approach 4.5, the risk of cardiac events drop.
Doctors get very tense about potassium supplementation in fear of hyperkalemia.
But the RDA for potassium use to be ~4200mg. I'm guessing most don't remotely approach the new or old RDA.
If you're taking potassium sparing medications, things are further complicated. K levels would have to be checked more often.
I supplement with potassium citrate. My blood pressure has normalized.
I didn't add it as one of my listed items, but I did try supplementing with potassium before starting with medication and for me it wasn't beneficial, though it certainly would be for people with deficiencies.
If someone has a consistently low potassium level, you should see an endocrinologist and get tested for Hyperaldosteronism.
Surplus aldosterone causes the body to retain more salt, which in turn increase blood pressure.
Consistently low potassium, early onset of hypertension, taking three or more BP medications (one of which is a diuretic), all red flags.
Hyperaldosteronism should be pursued.
I had my left adrenal gland taken out to address it.
> Doctors get very tense about potassium supplementation in fear of hyperkalemia.
Supplementing with potassium is not recommended because it's not very effective. 99 mg of potassium citrate gives you only 38 grams of potassium- *you need ~100 pills to get your daily value!* You will see much better results from changing your diet to include more potato (note: 1/4 of the potassium is in the skin), beans, and spinach (although a lot of spinach- 10oz has as much as a large potato). One large potato can give you 900 mg of potassium.
My guess is that it's effective for those that are chronically K deficient, through Hyperaldosteronism or some other condition.
That would still be four large potatoes a day, to hit the original RDA. Every day.
I buy it in powder form to get the high levels needed. https://www.bulksupplements.com/products/potassium-citrate-p...
Agree, the dosing on tablets are ridiculously low.
Eating several large potatoes, bananas, avocados every single day sounds miserable.
Same with nuts and other seeds. Fine, in moderation. Phytic acid literally is a chemical countermeasure to stop animals from eating the next generation of a plant.
Oxalic acid, abundant in spinach, is another fun one.
I've had multiple lithotripsy procedures, thanks to kidney stones.
I wouldn't wish kidney stones on my worst enemy.
>If you're taking potassium sparing medications, things are further complicated. K levels would have to be checked more often.
The middle-aged part for sure, but I don't drink, I'm an ideal weight and have a mid to high level of fitness -- high cholesterol and a super high BP before medication. Sometimes it just be the way it is.
Caduet comes with a list of warnings, primarily courtesy of the Lipitor (atorvastatin) component. Periodic bloodwork is necessary to make sure there isn't liver damage occurring, etc. I've endured zero side effects of any sort, and my bloodwork has been stellar. With a 10/20 caduet (which means 10mg amlodipine / 20mg atorvastatin) my triglycerides fell from 2.63 to 1.06, cholesterol from 6.33 to 3.64, LDL from 4.23 to 2.2.
Was super surprised at the scale of the improvements.
- Coffee increases systolic by 15 mmHg for 6 hours, so does smoking.
- Lisdexamphetamine (I am diagnosed ADHD) decreases BP by 10 mmHg
- Good sleep for 5+ consecutive days decreases BP. One day isn't enough.
- Rebound hypertension when forgetting my BP meds is a thing. +10 mmHg the next day.
- Low carb diet decreases BP steadily after the first week or so, especially if your metabolism is out of whack (understandable due to the deleterious effect of fructose on nitric oxide production)
- Amateur BP readings (wrong time of day, single measurement, not relaxed enough) can add 30 mmHg easily. Readings taken at the GP's office are worthless for this reason. My advice is measure every 3 minutes until your BP measurement stabilises. The correct reading is the lowest. Sometimes you need 15 minutes to reset to baseline.
- Also important is the delta between systolic and diastolic. Mine is around 40 mmHg, if it's higher than that, it's an indicator of a stress peak (bad sleep, bad day, overwhelmed) that usually resolves after a couple days.
Some people will be like me, many others won't, but the real lesson is that there are no hard and fast quick fixes.
I have tracked by BP over 50 kg of weight change, and BP correlates really nicely with fitness level, stress, etc. even though trends are visible over months, not hours.
There certainly are no quick fixes, apart from taking a BP pill (I take telmisartan+amlodipine, the latter replacing a diuretic that made me drier than the Sahara desert)
People are different. Someone who has mild hypertension probably can tweak some lifestyle dials and control it. I had severe hypertension with nothing to point the finger at (e.g. obesity, lifestyle, etc). For whatever reason my body was malfunctioning and in a recursive death loop of escalating hypertension.
Have a look at the effect of fructose on blood pressure. Low carb seems to work well for me, but I'm not consistent enough to see my BP trend down to the point I can throw my pills away. I'm working on it.
And yeah, the entire salt scare is pretty much nonsense that's slowly being debunked. I have a friend who eats more salt than a goat, and he's got hypotension. Go figure. Hyponatremia is not fun, I tend to use salt liberally these days.
You could of course argue that if he ate a ton of salt, his blood pressure would surge. But I wish he would've taken the surgery sooner rather than trying to out-diet and out-exercise his genetics as the diet/exercise had really small effect.
My favorite example of this is from figure 2g of [0]. It shows the time series of blood glucose levels from two participants after eating a cookie or a banana, and they have nearly the opposite responses to each other. It was the thing that convinced me that a ton of modern nutrition that isn’t personalized is basically useless.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, or there is something wrong with my own knowledge, but "30 mmHg" added to systolic seems extremely high.
I am currently an EMT-B student here in the United States, and taking vital signs like blood pressure is our bread and butter. We practice it several times a week, on different people with different body types and different blood pressure baselines. Anything more than ±4 mmHg in a manual reading is terrible accuracy, and anything like +30 mmHg probably comes from someone who doesn't know how to use the equipment.
But again, maybe there is something I am missing. If there is I'd love to be educated and hear about it!
When you're at the GP's office, you might have been rushing to get there, you do a minute of small talk and then they strap on a cuff and tell you "oh my, it's very high", this is the reason. And it happens so often it even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_coat_hypertension
I have seen dozen of times, because of effort, anxiety, whatever, my BP being 160/110, which drops to 130/85 after 15+ minutes of complete relaxation. Many amateurs (which apparently includes most GPs) simply do not let the BP settle. The medical value of tracking BP is to know its baseline at rest, otherwise it's a meaningless number.
Just before our wedding, my dad had an crisis, and had to go to the hospital with an infection. He went to Johns Hopkins. They put him in the research wing. The doctors couldn't figure out what the heck to do with him because he was reacting so weird to so many medications. They ended up having to pump him full of vancomycin in hopes that he would last long enough on the three hour flight to get back home where his regular doctor could see him.
People are individuals, and their bodies can react in weird and unexpected ways.
That said, whether I'm oversensitive or more attuned than most ADHD people, I take a light dose, which doesn't turn me into a productive robot machine going 1000 mph.
Stimulants follow a U-curve, and I wouldn't be surprised to know that most people take far too much and have to keep increasing their dosage. A single 30 mg dose makes my anxiety skyrocket, I usually take 20mg twice a day, I've recently experimented with lowering to 15mg twice a day and I think I like it even better.
Vyvanse saved my life.
Omrons are accurate and reliable, and most new models like the Silver have bluetooth and with the Omron connect app will share the data with Apple Health if that's your platform, or you can just keep it in the app and it gives you trends and insights.
Maybe if you did that, you wouldn't disagree so much?
Is this universally true or just you? Is there any source for this? My diastolic pressure is always in the normal numbers while my systolic pressure is borderline high, resulting in a pretty high delta (50-60 mmHg). Sometimes I also get numbers in the normal range for systolic pressure, but maybe 75% of the time it's a bit high.
The root cause was that I moved to a 2000’ higher elevation, and was dehydrated.
Since winter air is lower humidity, I suggest you drink two extra pints of water per day, spread across three-four sittings.
Will it work? Probably not. But, I’d give it an over 10% chance, and it will cost you nothing.
If my blood pressure is low before hand, the nurses get me to drink two jugs of water, blood pressure goes up to normal range with in minutes. Same before they let me drive home.
This has turned out to be a really useful tip for me life in general. If I'm feeling shit, I now suspect low blood pressure and force myself to drink two or three pints of water. It usually results in me feeling much better
Blood letting - wow!
> Haemochromatosis
Haemochromatosis is an inherited condition where iron levels in the body slowly build up
What I learned is that, for me,
-salt intake had zero impact
-coffee had no impact
-stress level had almost no impact
-alcohol had no impact
-exercise / activity levels had no impact
The single and only controllable factor I could find, short of drugs, was that if I was cold my blood pressure spiked significantly. I had much higher BP in the winter than in the summer, and could improve it by wearing layers, gloves, etc.
My body decided to go full ham on blood pressure and it was destroying my kidneys. I would be constantly annoyed by the sound of my own heartbeat doing things like trying to sleep.
Telmisartan + Caduet (which is amolodipine + lipitor) and now my blood pressure averages 100/60. And courtesy of the lipitor my cholesterol and triglycerides dropped 60%, from high to normal. Many thanks to the very brilliant people who work in that field and developed those drugs.
Anyways, thanks for coming to my TED talk on the magic of modern medicine.