Is it that the heart is pumping too hard by itself or is it that the circulatory plumbing is constricting the flow too much thus forcing the heart to pump harder to maintain the same flow rate?
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One of the most important things your body needs to do is maintain the right concentration of various salts in your blood. If your blood is too salty, your body will release more water into your blood to dilute it. This is why low sodium diets are recommended for people with high blood pressure.
Another cause is the narrowing of blood vessels, generally due to fatty deposits building up along their walls (the same type that can cause heart attacks).
Less commonly, high blood pressure may be caused by various diseases affecting the parts of your body that regulate blood pressure.
In the vast majority of cases, high BP is due to increased resistance within the circulatory system: elevated inflammatory levels, plaque in the arteries, vasoconstriction, obesity, etc. The increased resistance “dampens” blood flow so, in response, the heart will pump faster and/or harder to increase pressure. Increased pressure is a response to increased resistance.
Low salt diets *can* decrease blood pressure in people with health problems, so we’ve associated salt intake directly with high BP. Correlation is not causation. In a healthy person, increased salt intake will rarely impact blood pressure to a significant degree.
A bit of anatomy: Blood moves in a closed circuit, meaning when a heart pumps a volume of blood, that volume distributes to the whole body (cant escape the vessels) generating pressure on the walls of the vessels. As the blood enters small vessels, the pressure is relieved in the big ones. The blood then moves to the veins, getting sucked by the heart to be pumped again.
High blood pressure is diagnosed by checking how much outside force you need to apply to an artery (the vessel with higher pressures) to stop blood from flowing thru it. So, we look for BP on the walls of the arteries, so to say.
The high blood pressure forms in weak links of this mechanism, namely:
-walls are too stiff to dilate to acomodate incoming blood (fat deposits on the walls, calcification due to age, sedentarism etc)
-the heart cant suck back the blood, so the blood is left in veins w no space for the new blood to come in
-the quantity of blood is bigger than normal, mainly due to excess salt and other things that attract and hold water in the vessels, therefore generating a higher volume in a compartment that can only stretch so much
-various substances can contract the muscles in vessels to create a smaller compartment for the same amount of blood
-if the body s demands for nutrients are not met, the hearts pumps harder moving more blood from veins and other deposits into the arteries (aka high pressure compartiment) stuffing blood inside faster than it can get out
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