High blood pressure and aging.

0:00 Speaker 2 With us.

0:00 Speaker 1 Today’s doctor Peter Milos are in house genius and an expert in a historian doctor. You know, I call him live long and prosper. How do we live longer and prosper? Doctor Mihios give us this week’s report.

0:17 Speaker 2 Well, this week we’re going to talk about a very important topic and that’s how blood pressure is involved in anti aging. Because anti aging we think of a lot of the basics, but it turns out that blood pressure is involved in many aspects of aging, health span, and lifespan.

0:35 First of all, just to educate our audience of what exactly is blood pressure, Well, we need blood pressure to distribute our life giving, nourishing blood throughout our bodies. And basically, our heart is the master pump of blood. And when our heart contracts and pushes the blood pressure along. The blood pressure that happens at the moment the heart is

1:00 pumping is called the systolic pressure or the top number. And when our heart muscle is relaxed and it’s in the resting phase, that pressure is called the diastolic blood pressure, and that’s the baseline blood pressure. And blood pressure is measured in millimeters of mercury, which is basically the force that the blood pushes against the wall of the arteries

1:21 that transports the blood around the body. And then our veins are the collecting tubes that basically gather up all the distributed blood and then return it to the lungs to fill up like fresh gas fill up with fresh gasoline or what we have is our gasoline oxygen each time.

1:40 And then the walls of our arteries have actual muscles in them, and those walls they can change in size and that changes the size of the tube or what’s called the lumina of the artery. And this is an important feature because as we need the blood to transport and travel through different things affected like temperature, stress, you’re

2:00 standing or sitting and laying down, so a sedentary lifestyle, the arteries aren’t expanding and contracting as they would if one were active and exercising. So what happens is that if they’re not moving, then you get hardening of the arteries.

2:16 That’s why things that cause vessels to dilate, like exercise, even just walking or even going to a sauna causes your blood vessels to dilate. So when those blood vessels are moving, it’s harder for plaques and high cholesterol to harden against the wall of those arteries to aggravate the stiffening and the narrowing of the artery tube, and that

2:37 can lead to heart attacks and strokes. And that’s why when the arteries get hard and clogged and narrow, that’s why some people end up requiring stents to forcibly open them to get more blood flow. Because when your heart pumps, it also has something to go coronary arteries and it feeds itself, so high blood pressure can cause a lot

2:56 of problems because the body’s organs can’t tolerate it. Can cause kidney problems, heart failure, eye problems, aneurysms, which are bubbles or weaknesses in the walls of arteries they can rupture with high blood pressure. And even the Alzheimer’s societies have put out a lot of information on memory and brain problems because when your blood pressure is up, the

3:16 vessels say I can’t take it anymore, and they clamp down and they get narrow, so you don’t get enough blood to your head and this can exacerbate dementia in addition to heart attacks and strokes that we just talked about, and it affects your health span of course, and your lifespan.

3:32 And you know, oftentimes people go for a quick fifteen minute doctor appointment, you have high blood pressure and they give you a pill, but they’re not really spending the time to do detail things like my discussion recently with the anti aging specialist, doctor Maglena Swarzewski, talking about diet, lifestyle, family history, genetics, the vitamins you take, the supplements, and

3:57 doing extensive blood work with like at least one hundred fift the biomarkers to see because blood pressure can be also affected, like things like hyperthyroidism, and doctors don’t always check your fire on every visit. You can have a hormonal imbalance that can cause you to have high blood pressure.

4:14 You have to discuss diets, to talk about the salty foods that you eat, and people forget some of these basic things, or what your exercise routine is. There are even things that can affect the kidney which can cause high blood pressure. There’s even some tumors that can be around the kidney that can affect high blood high blood pressure, pressure.

4:37 Speaker 1 And the average doctor when you go into a see the average the average physician, he’s got fifteen minutes a half hour to see you, and he moves on to the next patient. And you know, unless he goes into details on different tests and different the reasons for high and low, you know, it’s a problem because of the

4:58 amount of time he.

4:59 Speaker 2 Has, Yeah, exactly, And that’s why sometimes, unfortunately, you have to advocate on your own and you have to sometimes. Now that’s why a lot of companies like the labs, you could actually order some of your own labs to find out what you have. For example, if someone has very high mercury levels, which I’ve experienced personally, and you

5:20 have unexplained the rapid heart beat, and you can get that from mercury toxicity, you can get anxiety, you can get a fast heart rate and that can raise your blood pressure, or even when you do genetic testing, I found out that I am more sensitive to caffeine consumption.

5:35 So if I have a little caffeine, it raises my blood pressure quite a bit and my heart rate goes up. But not everybody has that effect. So the more knowledge we have, the more we can help our patients. And I think precision medicine and more direct medicine is going to be a part of the future. And I think

5:53 part of it is going to be some of the testing we’re going to be doing at home, getting the reports and then bringing in to the doctor having to discuss it with them. And I suggest to our audience to have a list of questions to ask the doctor when you go, and just like you have to tell

6:08 them when you’re making the appointment that you have some questions and can they please allow the proper amount of time. Just like when I tell people who have light skin and fair skin and go to the dermatologists, I said, tell them specifically that you want a total body survey to scan your entire body to look for melanomas and

6:25 other legions. Otherwise you’re going to get five minutes or you’re going to end up seeing the PA or the nurse practitioner and you’re not going to get time to spend with the actual doctor. So sometimes doing your homework and telling them ahead of time your expectations it can be helpful. And having always bring a list of your medicines.

6:45 And if you ever have to go to the hospital emergency, iom always try to bring your bottles of medicine with you so that well they know exactly what you have so there aren’t any drug interactions, and in your wallet.

6:55 Always keep a card in your emergency contexts your list of medicines and what you’re allergic to, because especially if you’re on blood finners, because if you get into a car accident and you’re unconscious, somebody needs to know that you’re on a certain blood thinner so they can know how to treat you if you’ve had any trauma. So

7:12 these are some of the health sift.

7:13 Speaker 1 High blood pressure also, I believe affects the possibility of pocket sins and all timers.

7:21 Speaker 2 Yes, because they’ve shown that the high blood pressure, the small arteries and the brain say I can’t take this high pressure, so they clamp down in their narrow and the narrower they are, the less nourishment they bring in, and the less cleanup. As we talked about on other programs that the body does clean up. But in order

7:38 to transport those systems and drain them out of the brain and bring fresh, clean cells and nutrients and repairing cells, you need to have good blood flow. So when you have high blood pressure for too long, that’s one of the first places we diagnose it is actually an ophthalmology, because the only place in the human body you can

7:56 directly visualize blood vessels is the human eye. So when you start seeing ourterial and narrowing, as an alphthalmologist, you tell the patient, please see your internals, get your blood pressure, check that you have narrowing of the arteries in the back of the brain. And if it’s in the back of the eye, it’s in the brain. And guess what,

8:12 it’s also in the heart. And we warn people when they have a lot of our TiAl now and go get an EKG and get your heart check too. Well.

8:20 Speaker 1 Thank you, doctor Peter Mihillos, and thank you for advising how our friends and our listeners can live longer. And we’ve gotten so many calls about it, and thank you so much, and we’ll catch up again real soon.

8:35 Speaker 2 Thanks for always getting the truth out and helping our patients live long and prosper