Alterations to our diet and lifestyle mean that a growing number of people suffer from hypertension and it is extremely important for us to start monitoring our blood pressure regularly. Fortunately this no longer means that we have to head for the doctors office and the large range of easy to use and reasonably inexpensive monitors on offer today allows us to check our blood pressure in the comfort of our own homes. Nonetheless, though checking our own pressure might be easy enough, understanding the resulting numbers is quite another matter.
Blood pressure varies from person to person and also fluctuates according to things like the time of day and what we eat. This means that we cannot simply say that normal blood pressure is a given set of numbers and that should you be more than so many points either below or above these you need to see your doctor. What we are able to do however is to draw up a number of bands which signify various degrees of high and low blood pressure around a pair of baseline readings which apply to the majority of people and this is precisely what a blood pressure chart does.
A standard blood chart is a pictorial representation of a wide range of blood pressure readings below and above the norm including advice on what each band tells you about your blood pressure.
For example, if you were to take a blood pressure reading and come up with a high systolic figure of 137 and a lower diastolic figure of 87, this probably will not mean a great deal to you, apart from the fact that it may seem a little high. However, if you draw a line on a blood pressure chart joining the high systolic number on the left of the chart and the lower diastolic number on the right of the chart you will find that this line falls inside a band which is slightly above normal and that, although it is close to the borderline for hypertension, it is nevertheless still within an acceptable range.
Also, if you recorded a reading of 153 over 97 this would be seen as a mild case of hypertension. But, the chart would also reveal that this reading on its own should not be a cause for alarm and might merely result from recording your blood pressure early in the morning when pressure is frequently slightly high or of measuring it after eating something salty or with a high fat content.
Charts of this nature are extremely useful for giving you a clear snapshot of the state of your pressure at any given moment in time but perhaps a more useful picture would be given by a daily blood pressure chart which is completed over a period of time.
A lot of modern blood pressure monitors are able to store your readings and these can either be printed out and simply hand plotted on graph paper or can be used in conjunction with one of several readily available software packages to plot a colorful history of your blood pressure over the past few days.
Whichever method you select there is no doubt that having a visual representation of your pressure readings over time can certainly make monitoring your health considerably easier.
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