The Value Of Monitoring Your Blood Pressure And Making Use Of A Blood Pressure Chart

The Value Of Blood Pressure Monitoring And Plotting The Results on A Blood Pressure Chart

Changes to our diet and lifestyle mean that a growing number of people are suffering from hypertension and it is very important that we all begin monitoring our blood pressure on a regular basis. Happily this no longer means having to drag ourselves to the doctors office and the wide range of simple to use and relatively inexpensive monitors on offer today permits us to monitor our blood pressure in comfort at home. But, while checking our pressure might be easy enough, understanding the resulting figures is quite another matter.

Blood pressure will vary from one person to the next and also varies according to such things as the time of day and what we eat. As a result we cannot say that normal blood pressure is a given set of numbers and that should you be more than so many points either below or above these you need to consult your doctor. What we can do however is to draw up a number of bands which denote various degrees of low and high blood pressure around a set of baseline readings which are representative of the majority of the population and this is precisely what a blood pressure chart does.

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

For example, if you were to take a blood pressure reading and come up with a high systolic figure of 132 and a lower diastolic figure of 86, this quite possibly will not mean very much to you, apart from the fact that it might appear a little high. But, if you draw a line on a blood pressure chart joining the higher systolic reading on the left of the chart and the lower reading on the right of the chart you will see that this line lies in a band which is slightly above normal and that, although it is nearing the borderline for hypertension, it is still within acceptable limits.

Likewise, if you recorded a reading of 142 over 95 this would be classed as a mild case of hypertension. However, the chart would also indicate that this reading in isolation is not a cause for alarm and could merely be the result of taking your blood pressure first thing in the morning when pressure is generally slightly elevated or of measuring it shortly after you have eaten something salty or with a high fat content.

Blood pressure charts of this nature can be very useful for giving you a clear snapshot of your pressure at a given moment but possibly a more useful chart would be a daily blood pressure chart which is drawn up over a period of time.

The majority of modern blood pressure monitors will store your readings and they can either be printed out and plotted by hand on graph paper or can be used in conjunction with one of the many readily available software packages to draw a full-color picture of your blood pressure over the past few days or weeks.

Whatever method you select there is no question that having a visual representation of your blood pressure over time will make monitoring your health considerably easier.

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