What good does a blood pressure reading do if you are sitting down with a perfect 120/80 but once you start doing activity’s it rises 10-20 values. Considering that we are active most of the day would the higher values be bad for our body?
In: 5
“Harder to read blood pressure during activity” is only part of it. If I put specialized equipment in your radial or brachial artery, I can measure your blood pressure quite accurately with each heartbeat even while you’re exercising. In fact, medical researchers have done that. Turns out, during a heavy maximum effort lift, blood pressure can go up to 300mmHg. That’s normal. Your blood pressure is supposed to go up when you exercise. The mechanics of why it does so are beyond an ELI5 level, but rest assured that blood pressure is supposed to go up when you exercise.
The reason that BP is measured in clinical settings at rest is because that is the method used in all the clinical trials testing blood pressure medication. The whole point of measuring blood pressure is to see if you need medical treatment. To decide if you need medical treatment, I need to know if your blood pressure is abnormal. To know if it’s abnormal, I need to have a working definition of normal. That definition has to come from a consistent, reproducible measuring technique that I can do the same way over and over again for all my patients; that way I’m comparing apples to apples. So when we test blood pressure medicine in clinical trials, we measure blood pressure at rest in the trial participants because it is most consistently reproducible. If I want to decide whether you need a blood pressure medicine, I have to measure your blood pressure the same way it would have been measured in the clinical trials, so that I know I can use a reliable basis of comparison.
“Convenience” is part of the equation; standardization is the other part.
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