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The Value Of Blood Pressure Monitoring And Making Use Of Blood Pressure Charts

Changes to our lifestyle and diet mean that a growing number of people suffer from high blood pressure and it is very important for us to monitor our blood pressure regularly. Luckily this no longer means that we have to head for the doctor’s office and the large range of simple to use and quite inexpensive monitors on offer nowadays permits us to measure our blood pressure in the comfort of our own homes. Indeed, today monitors such as the Omron HEM-711 AC automatic blood pressure monitor, the Omron HEM-711 DLX automatic blood pressure monitor and, particularly, the Omron HEM-780 automatic blood pressure monitor make taking your own blood pressure a very simple operation.

Despite this, while checking our pressure might be easy enough, interpreting the resulting numbers is quite another matter.

Blood pressure differs from person to person and also varies according to such things as what we eat and the time of day. Accordingly we are not able to simply say that normal blood pressure is a fixed set of numbers and that if you find yourself more than a given number of either above or below these you need to consult your doctor. What we are able to do however is to draw up a number of bands which correspond to varying degrees of low and high blood pressure in relation to a set of baseline readings which are representative of the majority of the population and this is exactly what blood pressure charts do.

A traditional blood chart is a pictorial representation of a range of blood pressure readings below and above the norm together with advice on what each band tells you about your blood pressure.

For example, if you were to take a blood pressure reading and come up with a high systolic figure of 133 and a lower diastolic figure of 88, it is quite likely that this will not mean a great deal to you, apart from the fact that it appears a little bit high. However, if you draw a line on a blood pressure chart between the high systolic figure on the left of the chart and the low diastolic figure on the right of the chart you will find that the line lies in a band which is a bit above normal and that, while it is nearing the borderline for high blood pressure, it is still within acceptable limits.

Also, if you came up with a reading of 144 over 92 this would be seen as a mild case of hypertension. However, the chart would also reveal that this reading on its own should not be a matter for concern and may merely result from measuring your blood pressure first thing in the morning when your pressure is usually slightly raised or of recording it shortly after you have eaten something which is high in fat.

Blood pressure charts of this type can be extremely useful for giving you a clear snapshot of your pressure at any given moment but perhaps a more useful picture would be given by a daily blood pressure chart which is drawn up over a period of time.

Many modern blood pressure monitors can store your readings and these may either be printed out and simply plotted by hand on graph paper or may be used in conjunction with one of several readily available software programs to draw a full-color history of your blood pressure over the past few weeks.

Whatever method you select there is little question that having a visual representation of your blood pressure over time will make monitoring your health very much easier.

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