Any health professional out there? Blood Pressure question!?!
Question: I checked by blood pressure last night, it was 106 over 68. Also, when I get up from sitting or lying down, I tend to feel dizzy. Could someone tell me what's going on please?
Answers: I checked by blood pressure last night, it was 106 over 68. Also, when I get up from sitting or lying down, I tend to feel dizzy. Could someone tell me what's going on please?
Well, that is an interesting question indeed as it gives some clue to the diagnosis. I don't know about your age, other health problems and the drugs you might be taking regularly and have no idea about whether this blood pressure measurement was taken in sitting, lying down or standing position, at what time of the day and from which arm.
Please get your blood pressure measured from the same arm and by the same instrument and make sure that the technique of measurement is correct. Get your blood pressure checked while lying down and then one minute after standing up with the blood pressure instrument being kept at the level of your heart. See whether the blood pressure in standing position goes down? If it goes down for more than 10 mm of Mercury, you almost certainly suffer from postural hypotension. The symptom you describe is that of 'Postural Hypotension', a condition in which the blood pressure tends to fall instead of remaining steady or rise when a person sits or stands up from a lying down position. Normally when you get up to an erect posture, the blood in your vessels tends to gravitate down to the lower areas of your body and the blood supply to the brain, the organ that is at the highest altitude in your body tends to get jeopardised.To combat this, an special branch of your nervous system which is beyond your voluntary control, the Autonomic Nervous System comes to your rescue. It senses the lowering of blood pressure by specialised sensors, the baro receptors present in blood vessel walls, comes in action and by it's 'Sympathetic' wing, increases the force and rate of the contractions of the heart as well as the tone of your blood vessels, thus contracting them and maintaining the adequate pressure for the blood to keep the required blood supply to your brain. This fine tuning of the tone of your blood vessels according to the body posture, may be gone or disturbed in certain diseases and due to certain drugs.
The diseases that disturb your autonomic nervous system may be congenital (right from the birth) or aquired (developed later in life). Without going in to unnecessary details, let me remind you that the commonest cause of postural hypotension is Diabetes Mellitus, a metabolic disease with loss of blood sugar control, which slowly but ceratinly damages the human nervous system (and almost all other organs like kidneys, eyes, limb circulation, skin etc.). Chronic diabetics often suffer from postural hypotension. Many drugs specially those used in hypertension (Beta Blockers like Tenormin, Clonidine HCL, Alpha Blockers like Prazocin) casue postural hypotension. Severe nutritional deficiencies of certain vitamins like Thiamine, Pyridoxine, Pantothenic Acid and Cynacobalamin (Vitamin B 12) can also cause neuropathies and failure of the peripheral nervous system to respond to the lowering of blood pressure with change of posture. Chronic Alcoholoism too by direct toxicity upon the nerves and by nutritional deficiencies cause the same symptoms.
The symptoms of giddiness and light headedness appear in these cases due to a fall of blood pressure in sudden postural changes to erect position , hampering adequate blood supply to the brain in absence of the compansatory reaction of the autonomic nervous system damaged or disturbed by the factors mentioned above.
Sudden attacks of fainting preceeded by giddiness may not always be caused by postural hypotension. It may be just a vaso vagal attack due to transient dysfunction of the tenth cranial nerve (Vagus nerve) in certain situations, and is not supposed to be a dangerous condition.
Another cause of postural hypotension is rapid loss of body fluids in diarrhoea, vomiting, burns or severe haemorrhage (bleeding) which may be internal (in the abdomen or in the limbs or chest and not visible externally) in traumas and road traffic accidents. It may happen in a pregnant woman with rupture of an ectopic pregnancy (the embryo getting implanted and growing in the small tunnel of the Fallopian tube instead of the Uterus itself). Thus a person who has been involved in a road traffic accident or blunt trauma due to any reason, suffers from giddiness while standing up with a fall of blood pressure and rise of heart rate, must be urgently admitted in an Intensive Care Unit and carefully investigated and managed as he or she might be bleeding torrentially in an internal space and may pass in to shock coma and death.
I hope this will give you at least some idea of your problem. Treatment will obviously depend upon the correct diagnosis.
Best of luck!
It sounds to me like your blood pressure is dropping when you stand up, this is called postural hypotension. Really the only thing you can do for it is to stand up slowly, if you are lying down, sit up slow and sit on the side of the bed for a minute. Then slowly stand up....if this doesnt help see a doc.
I am not a health professional ,but still i think you can take more salt with your food ,that rises BP a bit.Or another way is to take more pulses that also good to maintain a normal BP.Please consult doctor about this to proceed.
That doesn't seem too low, my doc said 110/60 is normal.