For those struggling with hypertension, achieving goals isn’t always easy. On the contrary. It is essential to carefully follow the therapies, avoiding more or less desired “forgetfulness”, conscientiously observing the doctor’s instructions to get to drop below the fateful 130-80 millimeters of mercury or in any case around the values āāprescribed by the doctor.
But we must not forget that, sometimes, even the devil has a hand in it. In the form of other therapies, apparently unrelated to the intake of antihypertensives, which can still help raise blood pressure.
If, for example, arthrosis ailments appear or the mood is gloomy, as well as when it is necessary to use cortisone derivatives, it may in fact be necessary to take other treatments that may have an increase in blood pressure as an undesirable effect.
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This occurrence would not be particularly rare, at least according to research coordinated by Timothy Anderson of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, published in Jama Internal Medicine.
The survey examined nearly 27,600 people, recruited and followed for several years as part of the population study NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey), taking as parameters of hypertension values āāhigher than 130 maximum, or systolic, and 80 minimum. In this population, in general terms, in almost one case out of two (49.2%) the subjects suffered from hypertension: those with lack of blood pressure control were 35.4% of the total.
Nothing new, they will say. But the surprise that emerges from the study is another: observing the situation over time we have seen that 14.9% of the entire population subjects took drugs capable of raising blood pressure and even reached almost one in five (18 , 5%) considering only adults with hypertension.
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In short: iatrogenic hypertension, that is linked to medical treatments for other problems, is a reality to keep in mind, considering that often these other therapies are not prescribed by the doctor but are taken as a self-medication.
The selection of drugs that can interact on blood pressure was made on the basis of the guidelines of the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. It has been found that among the most commonly taken drugs with potential for hypertensive effect there are antidepressants (employed by 8.7% of people), non-steroidal anti-inflammatories or NSAIDs (6.5%) derivatives of cortisone and female hormones taken by less than two in a hundred people.
In short: even if, as the authors point out, it is difficult to reach the desired blood pressure values, we must not forget that this can also be affected by the fact that other therapies necessary to deal with different pathological pictures can negatively affect attempts to counteract hypertension, leading to the need to increase the dosages of antihypertensives or to combine different drugs to bring the pressure to the “right point”.
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The advice of the American researchers is simple: if you have to take other drugs for chronic diseases, always speak with your doctor to evaluate if there are alternatives that do not present the risk of raising blood pressure. “The risk of unconscious intake of drugs that increase blood pressure is real and is justified by the increased use of anti-inflammatory drugs often available without prescription and in the increasing diffusion of antidepressant drugs to combat social isolation – he comments Claudio Borghi, director of the Internal Medicine at the Sant’Orsola-Malpighi Polyclinic in Bologna. The level of attention towards these unconscious threats must always be high in patients who complain of painful syndromes of various kinds or in those who suddenly present with out of control blood pressure values āādespite unchanged lifestyle habits or, if treated, in the absence of any modification of the therapy . The great enemy in these cases is the low tendency of patients to consider these actions as relevant and the doctor’s task is to provide an explanation of the case through a wide-ranging “investigation”, with ad hoc questions, from which a culprit often emerges which must be removed or replaced with less harmful solutions for blood pressure control “.
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.