Military Service as a Cause of Hypertension and other Curiosities
We all know what causes sustained high blood pressure - too much salt in the diet, a family history of the disease, a weight problem, military service ... wait, did I just say military service? Who would have thought it? But that's what a study by the military seems to find now. American soldiers who are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan in real combat, are healthy when they go in, and hypertensive when they come out. As a cause of hypertension, military service is a new one. No one until now has ever found battle to cause all-new hypertension overnight.
Everyone's known about the long list of serious disorders that battlefield distress can bring on - there is depression, drug addiction that comes from depression, posttraumatic stress disorder and lots of others. Hypertension just joined that long and storied list. The study was thorough too - they studied nearly 40,000 military people, and about a fourth of those people were in active service in the Gulf. What they found at the end of the three-year study was, that as many times as a soldier went back on tour, he gained a third in risk of getting high blood pressure. As a cause of hypertension, active combat seems to be important, as the study reports that military personnel who were not in active combat, but were still in the Gulf, were somewhat at a lower risk.
Let's look into another poorly known cause of hypertension - a doctor sighting. It's actually called white coat hypertension. And it's been quite well-documented. Any time you head out to doctor's clinic or a hospital, the very sight of the sterile environment of the hospital with those serious emotionally-detached doctors poking and pushing at you, sends those anxiety levels up in people. Doctors have usually dismissed this as just a case of the jitters though. New studies being done though, wonder if hospital hypertension like this isn't all that harmless after all. It doesn't do anything to a normal person to show up in a hospital, they say; why does it do it do to only some people? Their explanation of this is, that these are people who are prone to blood pressure problems. So if the mere sighting of a doctor sends one's blood pressure up, that could be a clue that not all is well with one's circulatory system.
That's what the study did - it looked into hundreds of patients for nearly a decade, and found that the very people who reported high blood pressure in the surroundings of a hospital, usually go on later in life to get real high blood pressure problems. It could be, they say, that the easily excited and the easily nervous are the ones who have their blood pressure jump up in hospital. And those are qualities that could easily be a pretty strong cause of hypertension. It seems to make sense too. Two studies over the last five years have looked into hundreds of people who have reported actual five-point increases in blood pressure in the presence of a doctor. A half of such people go on in life to get real blood pressure problems. Now if only there was a way to help people get their stress levels down a bit. Ayurveda anyone?