High blood pressure (BP) is a serious and rapidly growing health crisis in India, affecting nearly 1 in 4 adults and causing around 1.6 million deaths every year, according to the Indian Heart Association . there’s another part many miss out on While keeping a check on your BP is one part of how you can track your health vitals.
But if the BP doesn’t drop at night, the risk of strokes and organ damage is much higher. Explaining the reason, the cardiologist stated, “When we sleep, the body is supposed to be relaxed and normally your BP should drop by at least 10% at night. Therefore, if you often experience broken sleep, then there is a chance that BP is silently damaging your body.
Your high blood pressure reading is just one part of the story; what actually matters is your nighttime blood pressure, according to Dr Alok.
Therefore, elevated nighttime BP and nighttime BP without the expected decrease from daytime BP readings are associated with worse cardiovascular outcomes and risk of incident heart failure. The same study also found that lower nighttime BP was associated with more adverse outcomes. Moreover, nighttime hypertension, a condition where nighttime BP remains elevated, is influenced by both lifestyle and physiological factors, including sleep disturbances and certain medical conditions.
Nighttime blood pressure (BP) dipping is a natural manifestation of circadian rhythm and the body’s physiological processes during sleep, according to the Journal of the American Heart Association.
