- Blood pressure is an essential measurement of health. People need to keep their blood pressure in a healthy range to reduce the risk of poor health outcomes, such as heart attack and stroke.
- A recent study found that people with normal blood pressure while sitting but high blood pressure while lying down are still at risk for poor health outcomes, such as coronary heart disease, heart failure, and fatal coronary heart disease.
- Further research is needed to see how beneficial it would be to regularly measure supine blood pressure in the clinical setting.
Medical professionals typically measure blood pressure to gather vital information about someone’s health. Most often, people are sitting during blood pressure readings.
However, this might not reveal the full picture about a person’s cardiovascular health, since some people can have high blood pressure while lying down and normal blood pressure while they are sitting.
Study results shared at the American Heart Association’s (AHA)
Typically, when someone’s blood pressure is normal, the reading is 120/80 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg).
For this study, researchers wanted to see if high blood pressure while lying down, also called supine hypertension, was a risk factor on its own for adverse cardiovascular disease. In other words, would someone who only had high blood pressure lying down still be at risk for…
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