Changing your lifestyle by walking more and losing a few pounds often is enough. We talk about it on the free newsstand insert with the Courier on Thursday
We are publishing a preview of an article in the new Corriere Salute. You can read the full text on the free issue on newsstands Thursday 7 October or in Pdf on the Digital Edition of the «Corriere della Sera»
Prevention is better than cure, an old advertisement said. A pearl of wisdom that we have evidently forgotten along the way, judging by a study recently published on The Lancet funded by the World Health Organization to take stock of thehypertension in the world over the past thirty years: in many Western countries the situation has not improved as it would have been possible thanks to advances in prevention, diagnosis and therapy, so since 1990 the number of hypertensive people has doubled. Today between the ages of 30 and 80 there are over 1.2 billion, according to the estimates that emerged from the survey: something went wrong and even in Italy the situation got worse.
“Our country follows the international trend: the incidence of hypertension has increased in recent years,” he observes Guido Grassi, director of the Medical Clinic of the San Gerardo Hospital in Monza and president of the Italian Society of arterial hypertension (Siia). “The reasons are varied: in the meantime, people measure their blood pressure a little more. Before it happened less often that it was measured during the visit to the family doctor, today the check-up is more frequent and brings out cases more often. In addition, the methods for measuring blood pressure have improved: there is no longer only the doctor’s sphygmomanometer, but also instruments that can monitor it over the course of 24 hours which have made it possible to bring out many cases that in the past were unknown. Having said that, many do not know their pressure values ».
More hypertensive is found thanks to a better diagnosis, therefore, but this is not the only element that “inflates” the number, as Grassi specifies: “In recent years, the standard of normality values has lowered a bit and this it has led to people who in the past would not have been hypertensive. However a the element that affects a lot is the lifestyle: we have habits that promote hypertension and, for example, we are besieged by stress which is a frequent cause. Stress has a powerful pro-hypertensive effect and we should be able to keep it under better control ».
You can continue reading the article in the Corriere Salute on newsstands for free on Thursday 7 October or in Pdf in the Digital Edition of the Corriere della Sera.
October 6, 2021 (change October 6, 2021 | 12:20)
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