Longevity Briefs: Lowering Your Blood Pressure May Be Essential For Heart Health And Longevity

Longevity briefs provides a short summary of a novel research that caught the attention of our Oxford researchers, due to its potential to improve our health, wellbeing, and longevity.

Why is this research important: We know that high blood pressure is a ‘silent killer’ and has terrible consequences for your health and longevity. In fact, if you have a high blood pressure around 180/120 or higher then there is an 80% chance of death within one year. But does that mean that those of us with average or normal blood pressure have nothing to worry about?

What did the researchers do: Researchers from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia recently presented a report which analysed the blood pressure of nearly 350,000 people for the impact of blood pressure lowering drugs regardless of whether they had low, normal, moderately high, or high blood pressure. The average age of the study participants was 65 years, and they had at least 8 blood pressure readings taken over 4 years.

Key takeaway(s) from this research: The researchers found that regardless of their blood pressure levels, whether low, normal or high, all participants in the trial benefited from taking blood pressure lowering drugs. For every 5 mmHg reduction in systolic blood pressure the risk of heart disease was lowered by 10%. Based on this data Professor Kazem Rahimi of the University of Oxford concluded “Greater drops in blood pressure with medication lead to greater reductions in the risk of heart attacks and strokes.”

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