Monitoring Your Blood Pressure And Using A Blood Pressure Chart!

Changes to our lifestyle and diet mean that a growing number of people suffer from hypertension and it is very important for us to start monitoring our blood pressure on a regular basis. Happily this no longer means that we have to drag ourselves to the doctors office and the large range of simple to use and quite inexpensive monitors available nowadays permits us to measure our blood pressure in the comfort of our own homes. However, although checking our pressure might be easy, interpreting the resulting figures is not always so easy.

Blood pressure will vary from one individual to the next and also varies with such things as the time of day and what we eat. This means that we are not able to simply say that normal blood pressure is a given set of numbers and that should you be more than so many points below or above these then you need to consult your doctor. However, what we are able to do is to define a series of bands which correspond to varying degrees of high and low blood pressure in relation to a set of baseline readings which apply to the vast majority of people and this is precisely what a blood pressure chart does.

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

For instance, if you take your blood pressure and come up with a systolic reading of 137 and a diastolic reading of 86, this quite possibly will not mean a great deal to you, apart from the fact that it might seem a bit high. But, if you draw a line on a blood pressure chart joining the higher number on the left of the chart and the lower diastolic number on the right of the chart you will discover that this line falls within a band which is a bit above normal and, although it is nearing the borderline for hypertension, it is still within an acceptable range.

Likewise, if you came up with a reading of 148 over 94 then this would be classed as a mild case of hypertension. But, the chart would also tell you that this reading on its own is not a matter for alarm and may merely be the result of taking your blood pressure early in the morning when pressure is generally slightly elevated or of taking a reading after eating something with a high fat content or which is salty.

Blood pressure charts of this nature are very helpful in providing you with a clear snapshot of your pressure at a given moment but perhaps a more useful picture would be given by a daily blood pressure chart which is plotted over a period of time.

Most modern blood pressure monitors can store your readings and they can then either be printed out and simply plotted by hand on graph paper or can be used in conjunction with one of the many widely available software packages to produce a full-color picture of your blood pressure over the past few days.

Whichever method you select there is no question that having a graphic representation of your blood pressure readings over time will make monitoring your health considerably easier.