Alterations to our lifestyle and diet mean that a growing number of people are suffering from hypertension and it is vital for us to start monitoring our blood pressure regularly. Happily this no longer means having to trek to the doctors surgery and the large and growing range of simple to use and relatively inexpensive monitors available nowadays permits us to monitor our blood pressure in comfort at home. Nevertheless, though measuring our pressure may be easy, interpreting the numbers is quite another matter.
Blood pressure varies from one person to the next and also fluctuates with things like the time of day and what we eat. For this reason we cannot simply say that normal blood pressure is a fixed set of numbers and that if you are more than a given number of above or below these you need to consult your doctor. However, what we are able to do is to define a number of bands which correspond to various degrees of high and low blood pressure around a pair of baseline readings which apply to the vast majority of the population and that is exactly what blood pressure charts do.
A typical blood chart is a graphic representation of a wide range of blood pressure readings both above and below the norm including an indication of what the bands tell you about your blood pressure.
For instance, if you take a blood pressure reading and come up with a high systolic figure of 131 and a lower diastolic figure of 88, this probably will not mean a great deal to you, except that it may appear a little bit high. However, if you draw a line on a blood pressure chart joining the high figure on the left of the chart and the lower figure on the right of the chart you will see that the line falls inside a band which is a little above normal and that, although it is approaching the borderline for hypertension, it is still within acceptable limits.
Likewise, if you were to record a reading of 150 over 97 this would be seen as a mild case of hypertension. Nevertheless, the chart would also tell you that this reading on its own is not a cause for concern and may simply be the result of recording your blood pressure first thing in the morning when your pressure is generally slightly high or of measuring it after eating something salty or with a high fat content.
Charts of this nature are extremely useful for giving you a snapshot of your pressure at any given moment but perhaps a more useful chart would be a daily blood pressure chart which is plotted over a period of time.
The majority of modern blood pressure monitors have the ability to store your readings and they can either be printed out and simply plotted by hand on graph paper or can be used in conjunction with one of several readily available software programs to plot a full-color history of your blood pressure over the past few days.
Whatever method you select there is little question that having a visual representation of your blood pressure over time can certainly make monitoring your health a lot easier.
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