Chapter 1: How Your Body Controls Blood Pressure
To understand why high blood pressure is a serious health problem, you first need to become familiar with the concept of blood pressure. This chapter reviews how and why the body maintains blood pressure and what can go wrong in the many systems involved.
Your heart and blood vessels work together to deliver oxygen and nutrients throughout the body and to remove waste products, such as the carbon dioxide you exhale with each breath. Blood is the medium through which these substances are transported. Blood pressure is the result of two opposing forces in the body: the force created by the heart when it pumps blood out and the force of the arteries (blood vessels that carry oxygen and nutrients to the tissues) as they resist this blood flow. The force generated by the heart when it contracts is called the systolic blood pressure, the force against the walls of the arteries when the heart relaxes is called the diastolic blood pressure. If the force of the heart pumping blood or of the arteries resisting blood flow (or both) are too great, you have hypertension.
A CARDIOVASCULAR PRIMER
You need oxygen and food to survive. Your body has a sophisticated method for delivering oxygen and nutrients to each of the millions of cells that make up your tissues and organs. Blood is kept in constant circulation by the pumping action of your heart. The heart sends blood first to the lungs to pick up oxygen, then to the rest of the body, and back to the heart through a system of tubes known as the vascular system. Because the heart and blood vessels (the vascular system) are all joined in one continuous and interdependent circuit, you will usually hear this called the cardiovascular system.
Your heart is the small, powerful pump that moves blood through the cardiovascular system. Even though it is not much larger than a clenched fist, your heart is the hardest working muscle in your body. Your heart beats approximately once each second and is responsible for pushing 10 to 11 pints of blood through 60,000 to 100,000 miles of blood vessels.
Your heart is divided into four chambers separated by valves that prevent backflow and intermingling of blood among the chambers. Blood that has circulated through the body is received by the first heart chamber, the right atrium. Once this oxygen-poor blood has been collected in the atrium, it is pushed into the next heart chamber, the right ventricle. The right ventricle sends this "used" blood straight to the lungs through the pulmonary artery (the only artery to carry oxygen-poor blood). The lung tissues filter out the carbon dioxide and supply oxygen to the blood. This oxygen-rich blood returns to the next heart chamber, the left atrium, through the pulmonary veins (the only veins to carry oxygen-rich blood). When this oxygen-rich blood has collected in the left atrium, it is pushed into the final heart chamber, the left ventricle.
The left ventricle is the main pumping chamber of your heart. The largest and most powerful chamber, the left ventricle sends oxygen-rich blood through the aorta, the body's largest artery, to the entire body. The left ventricle works so hard that its muscular walls can be over one-half inch thick, more than three times thicker than those of the right ventricle.
Like any other organ, your heart needs oxygen and nutrients to function. The heart supplies blood to itself through two coronary arteries (right and left) that branch off the base of the aorta. The "used," oxygen-poor blood drains through the coronary veins directly into the right atrium. High blood pressure puts you at risk for coronary artery disease, so you can now see why these particular arteries are so important to keep healthy. When blood flow through these vessels is reduced or blocked, parts of your heart become weak and may even die. This is a heart attack.
So that it can separate the oxygen-rich blood from the "used" blood, the vascular system is divided into two components. Arteries deliver oxygen and nutrients from the heart to the body, and veins return oxygen-poor blood back to the heart, where the cycle begins again. Arteries and veins branch off into ever smaller and thinner walled vessels as they get farther from the heart and deeper into the tissues. The arterioles conduct blood from the arteries to the capillaries. Capillaries are the body's smallest blood vessels, which transmit oxygen and nutrients to individual cells and collect waste products. From the capillaries, blood low in oxygen and full of waste products flows first to venules (the smallest veins), which then pass blood along through veins back to the heart.
A healthy person's arteries are muscular and elastic. They stretch when the heart pumps blood through them. They can also change their diameter as needed to regulate the flow of blood. To raise blood pressure, the arterioles constrict or become narrow, to lower it, they dilate or widen. You will learn how and why in the sections ahead.
BLOOD PRESSURE CONTROL
You might think that your heart is responsible for your high blood pressure, but many organs and the chemicals they produce are involved. Because so many body systems are involved, researchers still have not determined the exact cause of hypertension. Blood pressure can be altered by anything that affects total cardiac output (the amount of blood your heart pumps) or total peripheral resistance (the degree to which blood vessels resist blood flow) or both.
Cardiac Output
Your heart, controlled by the brain, works to circulate blood continuously at a steady rate of about 5 quarts per minute. If you have excess fluid in your body, your blood volume goes up, causing both your cardiac output and your blood pressure to increase as well. The greater the volume of fluid, the harder your heart and blood vessels must work to circulate it. Diuretics, a common type of drug used to treat hypertension, work by reducing the volume of fluid in the body.
Your kidneys, the two bean-shaped organs in your lower back area, regulate the amount of fluid circulating in the body. They control fluid volume by either retaining salt and water or eliminating them in your urine. Normally, if you have eaten too much salt, your kidneys eliminate the excess sodium along with a certain amount of water. However, if your kidneys cannot get rid of the extra sodium, your body retains water, which raises blood volume and therefore blood pressure.
Two important chemicals are involved in maintaining the proper balance between sodium and water in the body. One is an enzyme produced by the kidney called renin. (Enzymes are proteins that speed up various chemical reactions in the body.) The kidney decides when to release renin on the basis of the amount of fluid in the body (which in turn is determined in part by the amount of salt you eat) and on the level of blood pressure in the arteries that supply the kidney. The lower the pressure, the more renin released. Renin acts by speeding up the conversion of angiotensinogen, another protein in the blood, to angiotensin. This reaction and its consequences are described in the next section.
Renin's by-products also stimulate the adrenal glands, which sit right on top of the kidneys, to produce a second chemical involved in regulating sodium levels in the body. This second chemical is a hormone called aldosterone. Unlike enzymes, hormones enter individual cells and serve as chemical messengers to their target tissues. Aldosterone goes from the adrenal glands into the blood and then to the kidneys. Aldosterone's chemical message to the kidneys is to retain more sodium and water. This retention of sodium and water elevates blood pressure.
The adrenal glands produce other hormones that affect cardiac output and blood pressure. Wh
