Yk those blood pressure measuring things doctors use? Ones that press your arm really hard and stuff? How do they work?
In: Technology
There are two components to measuring blood pressure. There’s the inflatable cuff that you noticed and there’s also a stethoscope. The cuff has a little gauge on it that displays how much pressure it’s putting on your arm. The idea is to put so much pressure on your arm that the blood stops flowing through it. Once that’s done, the pressure is slowly let off.
So, where does the stethoscope come in? That’s put against your arm’s blood vessels so that the doctor can listen to when the blood starts flowing again, while at the same time monitoring the little gauge. Here, we have two things the doctor checks for. First, there’s the *systolic* blood pressure, which represents how much pressure is inside your arteries when your heart beats, which is typically around 140 mmHg (millimeters of mercury) in most healthy people. The pressure on the cuff keeps going down until the doctor can hear the blood constantly flowing, even when the heart is relaxed. That’s the *diastolic* blood pressure, which is usually around 80 mmHg.
Blood pressure is then written as the systolic pressure over the diastolic pressure, so that a normal result appears as 140/80. If the result is different, that’s an indicator that you have some sort of major health issue that might affect how well your heart works, either now or in the future.
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