Blood Pressure Drugs For All Patients ?
A recently published medical report issued by the University of Oxford claims that fewer people would die if doctors gave them blood pressure drugs .Medical experts have analysed results coming from over 100,000 patients in two decades.
Up to now, doctors started prescribing drugs when a patient had a blood pressure above 140 mmHg. The study found that reducing blood pressure by 10 mmHg would lower the risk of a heart attack by 2o%. Research experts say that doctors should try to keep the blood pressure of their patients to below 130 mmHg.
Doctors of the research team say that risk patients - those who smoke, have high cholesterol levels or diabetes would profit most if they took blood pressure drugs at an early age. It would lower the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Some even recommend that drugs be given to every adult, regardless of their blood pressure.
The results say that treating blood pressure to a lower level would potentially save millions of lives. Today, more than 1 billion people around the world suffer from high blood pressure. 10 million of them die every year. Prescribing blood pressure drugs to high-risk patients would cost comparatively little, but have positive effects.
Heart specialists argue that there is a natural way of bringing down blood pressure. People should take on a healthy diet and do a lot of exercise. Smoking and drinking alcohol, on the other hand, raises blood pressure levels. They claim that there are side effects that must be considered if blood pressure goes down too low.
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Words
- analyse = look at the results closely
- argue = to give reasons about something
- billion = a thousand million
- blood pressure = force with which blood travels through your body
- cholesterol = chemical substance found in your body; too much of it may cause heart disease
- claim = to say that something is true
- comparatively = here: small compared to something else
- consider = to think about something
- decade = ten years
- diabetes = serious disease in which there is too much sugar in your blood
- diet = the food that you eat regularly
- drugs = medicine
- heart attack = situation in which a person's heart suddenly stops working
- issue = here: to officially give the report to the media
- mmHg = unit that is used for measuring a person's blood pressure
- potentially = possibly
- prescribe = to say what medicine a person should take
- publish = to show to the public and the media
- raise = go up
- recently = a short time ago
- recommend = suggest
- reduce = lower
- regardless = here: it doesn't matter
- research = to study a topic in order to find out more about it
- side effects = effects that may be bad for you if you take certain drugs
- stroke = when a blood vessel in your brain suddenly gets blocked or breaks
- suffer = here: to be in pain or in a bad condition
- treat = here: to make someone healthy with the help of medicine