Question:
Sir: I have high blood pressure. I was over-weight; but I have lost the 45 pounds my doctor said for me to lose---and still my pressure has not budged, except at first when I lost the weight. My physician is perplexed as he has me on a combination of antihypertensives. He has switched them a number of times and nothing budges. I follow his "sensible diet" recommendations and I feel like "crap" with all those prescriptions and that damn diet. But, I do it. I have no energy at all. He has checked my kidneys, had a total body scan performed, and who knows what else he might come up with. Still, he said, "I don't know why your pressure stays at 140/90." It was at 160/70. Blood tests are normal, as is my PSA. As I intimated, I am not cheating on anything, but do feel like a "wet" noodle, in more ways than one. Do you have any suggestions I can present him with or I can just follow without going against his proscriptions and prescriptions?
Answer:
You're rather glib with the words...it is refreshing and I do read your meanings.
First, a few rhetorical questions are in order:- Do you lift weights? If
you do, than do you inject testosterone? If so, this can raise your pressure. Next, do you inject human growth hormone (HGH)? Same as in testosterone---can raise blood pressure. Now that I've said that, a host of questions will be sent to me concerning this; so, I will give the answer here:
- Testosterone: Increases salt and water retention by decreasing cortisol deactivation.
- HGH: Promotes the release of aldosterone from the adrenal glands and this causes sodium retention and the sodium attracts water and thus the edematous look of many body builders.
Blood pressure can rise with the large water retention. For more on Testosterone/Human Growth
Hormone, see my WebPage:
Questions For The Doctor
Are You A Mouth Breather When You Sleep?
Do You Have Sinusitis?
Are Weight-Lifting Supplements Part of Your Regimen, Such as L-Arginine, Creatine, etc...?
Breathing Slowly May
Lower Your Blood Pressure
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Let's discuss what is not often known by the average physician; however, it is becoming more known. "Medication, diet, and exercise might not be enough." But lowering your breathing rate has got the attention of 10,000 physicians in America. It may be just what you need to learn to do, with a few other things we will discuss shortly.
Yes! A number of people have lowered their blood pressure with medications, but feel awful. They tired, lethargic, weak, and can hardly get through the day. Perhaps, we can turn this around for you and under your doctor's auspices, reduce your medication to "zero" or just "one."
But you've got to do the work...and it looks like you have the intestinal fortitude to do so from reading your question.
We know that if you are overweight, lose the excess, increase your physical activity, and reduce your sodium intake, you tend to reduce your blood pressure. However, high blood pressure, still, often necessitates medication. The first line of choice professionally suggested, is to place patients on thiazide diuretics, bringing more medication on the scene if the blood pressure is recalcitrant.
Physicians have had patients try yoga and meditation exercises with some luck. These are relaxation techniques that utilize rhythmical inhaling and exhaling through the nose primarily. Research on proving the effectiveness of yoga and meditation for blood pressure reduction has been spotty. Your editors feel it partly controls the excess release of cortisol, a stress-related hormone.
Why slow breathing works is a puzzle. It is known that if one breathes slowly and deeply, the blood vessels dilate because they relax temporarily. But this does not effect a lasting drop in blood pressure.
Dr. David Anderson, director of behavior and hypertension at NIH's National Institute on Aging, has taken up the study of slow, deep breathing and blood pressure reduction. He contends that people under chronic stress breathe shallowly and not knowingly, hold those breaths. This he feels keeps you alert by diverting more blood to the brain. But, inhibitory breathing---a term he coined--delays the excretion of salt just enough, resulting in raising blood pressure.
By holding a breath, he points out, blood is diverted to the brain and at the same time the blood is made more acidic, thus causing the kidneys to get rid of less sodium. Animal studies show this to be true in those animals researched. Dr. Anderson is now on a mission to prove this occurs in humans as well.
He says this about those animals: "They may be changing their blood gases and the way their kidneys are regulating salt."
Dr. Anderson is trying to prove the above with a special instrument that trains people with high blood pressure to breath more slowly. The device is called RESPeRATE.
Notice, in using this device, there is no "mouth breathing."
Go to Resperate. Scroll down to View, and watch the interactive RESPeRATE demonstration.
Mouth Breathing :
What
It Does To Blood Pressure
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Dr. Raymond Silkman, dentist, points out in the Winter2005/Spring2006 issue of Wise Traditions, that when one breathes through the nose, conditions are such that incoming air is somewhat filtered, but the key is that it is moisturized and thus made humid. When breathing through the nose, a bony shelf-like structure present in the nose, called the turbinates, slows down the incoming air to allow the proper mixing of it with nitric oxide (NO). This gas is produced in the nasal sinuses and secreted into the nasal passages. There, it is inhaled into the lungs from the nose.
When you exercise and stretch the blood vessels due to the coursing of the blood volume through the blood network, NO is released within those vessels of the smooth muscles contained therein and causes a relaxing of the blood vessels and hence the vessels expand, decreasing blood pressure.---See Karp, Gerald, Cell And Molecular Biology, Fourth Edition;'The Role of NO As An Intercellular Messenger'; pp. 658-660.
Nitric oxide is a potent vaso-dilator, and when the lungs receive their share through proper breathing; NO increases the absorption of the inhaled air's oxygen.
With mouth breathing, the following conditions are set up: - Air is not humidified,
- It is not slowed down to allow proper mixing with NO,
- The lungs have difficulty providing the most optimum body oxygenation.
You are getting dry, unfiltered, dehumidified air and the most important thing: The air is lacking NO.
This chronicity directly affects the body, especially the cardiovascular system. The reason is because the heart's coronary arteries' smooth muscles respond to this dry nitric-oxide-lacking air by resulting in less stretch. You interpret this as tightness in the chest if severe enough. The whole body responds as high blood pressure. This permanent tension generates strokes, kidney damage, dementia, blindness and heart attacks.
Tests in humans have demonstrated that if NO generation is blocked, a blood pressure increase results. It is moderate, yet heart output is reduced also.
Mouth breathing results in a negative domino effect of every cell in the body because it deprives each cell of its quotient of oxygen. Health and well-being of humans depends on proper oxygen so people can enjoy good health. Incidently, cancer cells like having no oxygen.
If you snore, indicate sleep apnea (stop breathing), have high blood pressure, wet the bed, have chronic sinus and ear infections, sleep disorder, TMJ, or present with dark rings under the eyes, according to Dr. Silkman, these are manifestations of mouth breathing. Certain types of headaches are included in this list.
As a trial, we would suggest the above and include nitric oxide enhancers, such as NOX2, NIOX, or other products that elite body builders take for increasing the "pump" experience during exercise, which has been shown to help with feelings of well being and muscle mass building.
Another supplement that has recently been shown to do more than synergize muscle contraction is creatine monohydrate. It causes activation of satellite cells in the muscle cells to actually build new muscle tissue,
The Journal Physiology, published online March 31, 2006, says creatine monohydrate effects synthesis of protein directly in the muscle. Until now, scientists said, creatine monohydrate primarily worked by increasing creatine phosphate levels in muscles, which resulted in more Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) being formed. This means people can exercise more intensely because the supplement assists in contraction of muscle fibers.
The brain center of a cell is the nucleus, where the genes (genetic code) are housed. Normally, other cells have only one nucleus. In muscle cells, things are different---they have more than one nucleus. This facilitates those cells to add protein to the muscle cell. Journal Physiology points out that some of the muscle cell growth is concerned with new satellite cell formation which is just the nucleus of a new muscle cell. The growth of a muscle cell is dependent on a satellite cell that becomes a muscle cell nucleus. Muscle growth factors, such as testosterone helps muscle grow. Human growth hormone has a stimulatory effect on various tissues to form insulin-like growth factor number one (IGF-1). Satellite cells, under the influence of various muscle growth factors, thyroid hormone included, primarily the activated form of T4, T3, combine with muscle cells that are damaged or stressed, as in vigorous exercise and aging, to help those cells build, repair, and adapt.
What does this have to do with blood pressure? Two health organizations, the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association, have for the past 40 years, extolled aerobic exercises for people. But recently they have now added resistance exercise, such as weight training. Drs. Kerry Stewart and Randy Braith, from the University of Florida, Gainesville and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine summarized the health benefits of weight training which included the reduction of systolic and diastolic blood pressure about three (3) mmHg.--- Circulation, 138:2642-2650, 2006
And what happens when you weight train; destruction of tissue occurs, with a rebound of more and better tissue if under the proper diet and supplements.
By the time a person reaches 70 years old, most can't lift 10 pounds over head. Movement capacity suffers and their quality of life is impaired. They eventually get so weak they are confined to a wheel chair and can't take care of themselves. They require assisted living. With poor muscle strength, and often concomitant with this is higher blood pressure, if they are not confined to a wheel chair, they suffer falls, fractures, and accidents. Muscle loss is a progressive thing as one ages; however, it doesn't have to be. Training with weights throughout life or starting later in life creates a number of benefits.---WebMD Medical News, July 21, 2006.
Start practicing nasal breath control, weight training, and include some judicious supplements to your diet, and you may just see a change. You will definitely notice an improvement in the way you feel. You blood pressure may drop from 3 to 25 points on the high side, and 10 points on the low, systole/diastole. I have seen this in my patients a number of times.
Nitric oxide made news recently in that is was discovered that it also relays signals between nerve cells. This may be the modality in which it helps protect against cognitive dysfunction, by reducing abnormal blood pressure.---Science, 21 November 2003, p. 1320.
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