Does high blood pressure increase or decrease pulse rate?!
Question: Does high blood pressure increase or decrease pulse rate?
Answers:
Pulse rate and heart rate are the same thing. Just two different expressions meaning the number of times the heart beats per minute.
Heart rate is linked to BP in two opposing ways : Both BP and Heart rate automatically increase with increasing cardiac output.
So if you start exercising, both your heart rate and your pulse pressure (that's the difference between systolic and diastolic) will increase. The rate and extent to which they change are different however.
Same when they fall and go down again to normal.
But if pulse rate (heart rate) is too low, (by taking beta blockers for instance) and/or is prevented from rising properly, then pulse PRESSURE increases disproportionately to very high levels, (-often fatal).
When pulse-pressure is added to diastolic, the sum of the two is systolic, ... what you're probably thinking of as "blood pressure", and if pulse pressure is artificially high then so is systolic pressure. In this case it is low heart rate that is CAUSING high blood pressure, and not the other way round.
The value of blood pressure, whether 'high' or 'low', is always an effect, not the cause of that effect.
High BP and high HR are caused by, and are the result of stress, exercise etc.
But low HR actually causes high PP (pulse pressure) because they're inversely proportional to each other.
Sorry if this is difficult to understand; -it's a complex relationship to explain.
BP has to do with fluid volume and peripheral resistance of arteries and veins. Does not affect pulse, but can be affected by pulse. BP is the amount of fluid being pumped and how big the "pipes" are. Heart rate and pulse rate are the same in a healthy person. Heart rate is the amount of pumps per minute, BP is the amount of fluid pumped through the size of the arteries. Low fluid or big arteries lowers BP, high fluid or constricted arteries equals high BP.
RN
Sure, high blood pressure (hypertension) can definitely affect heart rate, because the heart naturally has to pump harder/faster for the force of blood flow to circulate more efficiently.