The Value of Monitoring your Blood Pressure and Using Blood Pressure Charts

Changes to our lifestyle and diet today mean that an increasing number of people suffer from hypertension and it is very important that we all get into the habit of monitoring our blood pressure on a regular basis. Happily this no longer means having to trek to the doctors office and the wide range of easy to use and relatively inexpensive monitors available nowadays permits us to check our blood pressure in the comfort of our own homes. Nevertheless, though checking our pressure might be easy enough, understanding the numbers is quite another matter.

Blood pressure varies from one person to the next and also fluctuates according to such things as what we eat and the time of day. For this reason we cannot say that normal blood pressure is a fixed reading and that should you be more than so many points above or below these you need to see your doctor. What we can do however is to draw up a series of bands which correspond to various degrees of low and high blood pressure around a set of baseline readings that are representative of the majority of the population and this is precisely what blood pressure charts do.

A typical blood chart is a visual representation of a range of blood pressure readings both below and above the norm with an indication of what the bands tell you about your blood pressure.

For example, if you take a blood pressure reading and come up with a systolic reading of 136 and a diastolic reading of 87, it is quite likely that this will not mean very much to you, except that it seems a bit high. But, if you draw a line on a blood pressure chart between the high figure on the left of the chart and the low figure on the right of the chart you will discover that this line lies inside a band that is a bit above normal and that, although it is close to the borderline for hypertension, it is nevertheless still within acceptable limits.

Equally, if you were to record a reading of 147 over 98 this would be seen as a mild case of hypertension. Nevertheless, the chart would also indicate that this reading on its own is not a cause for alarm and could merely result from measuring your blood pressure early in the morning when pressure is often slightly raised or of taking a reading after you have eaten something with a high fat content or which is salty.

Blood pressure charts of this type are extremely helpful in providing you with a snapshot of the state of your pressure at a given moment but possibly a more useful chart would be a daily blood pressure chart that is plotted over a reasonable period of time.

A lot of modern blood pressure monitors are able to store your readings and they can either be printed out and hand plotted on graph paper or can be used together with one of the many widely available software packages to draw a full-color picture of your blood pressure over the past few weeks or months.

Whatever method you pick there is no doubt that having a graphic representation of your blood pressure readings over time can certainly make monitoring your health a lot easier.