Natural Ways To Lower Bp

Depends what dose of magnesium you're taking (and I always recommend starting low) but you shouldn't expect much of a result inside the first three or four weeks. It's not a quick fix like meds. Then again, even if it doesn't work, it won't do you any serious harm. Also unlike meds!

Reading your comments about amlodipine echoes what I have read about from countless other people. So sorry you have had the problems. Damned medicines, sometimes they cause more problems than they cure.

If you were on Lisinopril which I think will be similar to Ramipril, i wonder why, when you developed the famous cough you were changed to a calcium channel blocker instead of one of the 'Artans' [Losartan for example]. i had always heard that was the way to go. [obviously not!]. I do know that amlodipine and similar are the first choice med if you are over 55 or Afro Caribbean, according to the NHS .  Ramipril etc are first choice if you are under 55 yrs.

i just hate it when the  drs start scaring you about heart attacks and strokes. Bullying tactics in my opinion. Interesting that you also take magnesium and vit D. Would be interested  to know how you get on.

 

What dose of magnesium are you on, nellybear? You can take up to 500mg per day with perfect safety, though it's advisable to start lower than that and work up. There are even people out there recommending 1500mg per day, so obviously it's a low-risk option. I wouldn't take that much, though. I've just upped my dose from 375mg to 562.5mg per day but obviously haven't had any results yet as it's only been a couple of days. The reason for the odd dose is that the preparation I take is in doses of 187.5mg per tablet, to allow people to take the recommended 375mg per day in two doses. I'm now taking three.

I'm also wondering what form of magnesium you're taking. I take the oxide, which is the most currently available, but also the least bioavailable. I've heard that the citrate or glycinate are more effective, but when I tried the citrate form it gave me terrible heartburn. The oxide has no side-effects whatever in my case.

The one problem some people get with taking magnesium in any form is diarrhoea, which can be bad enough to stop them taking it. It's not dangerous, however. Fortunately for me, I've always had the opposite problem, so I appreciated the mild laxative effect!

You're right to wait at least six weeks to see if there are any effects. However, I see you have the same problem as me - isolated systolic hypertension (ISH), or high systolic/low diastolic. This makes me suspect you might be in the same age group as me (I'm 72) as this pattern tends to occur with ageing. Unfortunately, it's less responsive to magnesium (or any other treatment) than the standard high systolic/high diastolic hypertension. Magnesium worked very well for me when I had standard hypertension (150/90) but hasn't prevented ISH from developing in the past couple of years. 

hi there lily

i have started taking mag oxide 2 a day 375mg im also taking standard dose calcium wirh vitimin d .My bp seems to have become high when i first started going through the menopause at 49 i am now 59 .when resting my bp is not to much of a worry but it dos go up quite high with any excersion ie doing house work,walking fast,and when i get stressed.im about a stone overweight i dont smoke and drink very little alcohol.Thefunny thing is my brother is very fit and has high bp and my mum also could it be hereditry.

I think high blood pressure is very often hereditary Nelly bear.

 

Jane's right - it often is hereditary. My mother had it too, but hers was different from mine. It was the standard type with both values high. At the time they first discovered it, at age 75, she had BP of 190/140. She was put on CCBs, which contolled it very well, though she had massively swollen ankles for the rest of her life. Unfortunately it didn't stop her having mini-strokes and she eventually went down to vascular dementia, though that didn't really start till she was 80. On the other hand, she was a lifelong heavy smoker, which probably didn't help.

These days they reckon that the type of hypertension that's the most serious is where there's a big difference between the two values. This is referred to as the pulse pressure and shouldn't be more than 40. I've started charting my BP twice a day and I've noticed the pulse pressure is rarely lower than 65 and has been over 100 on a few occasions, which I know is not good news. My systolic isn't very high, usually around 130, but my diastolic rarely goes above 65 these days and can even be 50. All these values are at rest. I find it doesn't change very much after exercise.

Medications don't do a lot for this type of hypertension, as they just lower both values, leaving the pulse pressure the same. I only upped my magnesium dose two days ago so it's far too early to see whether that will make a difference. (Though I'm guessing not.)

When I was first diagnosed 3 years ago they said I had hypertension in both systolic and diastolic and from the way they spoke it appeared  that that was serious.  Looking back I think the idea is to scare you, it certainly did me. Threats of strokes and heart attacks.

I keep a diary of my readings, 2 times twice daily. Checking each individual reading I am like you with  a pulse pressure never as low as 40, more often 60> but not 100.

Also if I go for a long brisk walk my BP drops way down if I take it on return I've never  understoods this as all the books say it will rise.

My  Omron home monitor gives me a systolic and diastolic reading and also what it calls pulse/min. Do you know what that is? I assume it is just the straightforward pulse.

Hi Jane,

Yes, pulse/min is just your pulse rate.

I've been doing a lot of research on this whole pulse pressure thing. As a result, I've started charting my BP after different kinds of exercise as well as morning and evening at rest.

After 10 days of this, I'm discovering something similar to you. My average resting pulse pressure (checked twice daily for the past month or so) is not quite as scary as I thought it was, at 68 - though that's still not good. However, I've been charting my post-exercise BP as well, albeit only for the past week.

So far I'm finding, like you, that immediately after brisk walking for an hour to an hour-and-a-half, both BP values drop, as does the pulse pressure. I'm getting values like 115/55, both lower than resting values, giving a PP of 60, which is also an improvement.

However, I do an intensive 8-minute on/off cardio exercise every day (as suggested by the BBC's Dr. Michael Mosely a couple of years ago) and this sends my PP up to an average 80. However, it does it not by raising the systolic, which I gather is what's supposed to happen, but by lowering the diastolic! I typically get readings of 130/50 after this type of aerobic exercise. Doing "the plank" for 1min 15secs produces a similar effect, but doesn't send the diastolic quite as low. (That's a core-strengthening exercise that takes a lot of effort but isn't strictly aerobic.)

I have no idea what all this means, but it's reassuring to hear someone else is getting the same weird results! I'm not due to see the doctor again till September, but I'll take a sample of my charts with me when I go.

All the reading I've done says high pulse pressure is a potential sign of all kinds of things, but mainly atherosclerosis when it occurs in the over-60s, so it's a predictor of heart disease and stroke. However, I did find a couple of articles that said while high PP predicts heart disease whatever the actual BP levels, it only predicts stroke if the diastolic is above 80. Apparently if low diastolic is causing the raised PP, you're only at increased risk of heart disease. I suppose that's some consolation, as my resting BP is usually in the region of 135/65. If I really had to choose, I'd rather have a heart attack than a stroke!

I've had my 6 month BP check up this morning. The GP likes me to chart my morning and evening readings [ 2 taken each time] 8 days before a check up, and to do an average of the lot.  This time it was 117/70 and I was really hopeful that the Losartan dose would be reduced back to 25mg.

Almost 2 years ago, July 2014, it was reduced to 25mg then last Sept  the BP rose sharply [briefly as it turned out] to 143/87 and the dose was raised back to 50 mg. By early Nov it was back in the 120s yet still I was kept on the 50 mg. Now I'm still not allowed to have a reduced dose as when the BP was taken in the surgery it was 180/?. It's always something like that I should add in the surgery and I feel that matters more than the home readings in the drs eyes.

The only mitigating factor is that if I didn't do home readings and the surgery readings were relied on then I would be on a full cocktail of heaven knows what with all the side effects.

I mentioned the magnesium and she was OK about that - not thrilled you understand but not totally anti either, so I will get started on that.

I just feel so fed up about it all. I hate taking meds especially when they are for ever, and right now I hate the NHS and their bossy nannying ways !! I hate the feeling that hypertension is lumped together with T2 DM and feel they are trying to infer it's self inflicted like I was an alcoholic or smoker or obese. I'm none of those things. 

I know I am probably being irrational and like the HCA said in the first instance 3 years ago "Well you are 70" like I was ready to be shunted into a care home!  Well i'm 73 now yet still feel 30 - 21 even!

I will take the magnesium and see if it makes a difference and I suppose I must continue with the Losartan but feel inclined to cut the tablets in half !!!  Any opinions on that?

Rant over, sorry but I do feel so p****d off about it all  

Sounds like "white coat syndrome" to me, Jane. Pity you didn't get the diastolic figure, as this is important in a case like this. If the systolic goes up dramatically in short-term, high-stress situations (like the doctor's surgery) but the diastolic stays more or less the same, that's not usually serious.

If it was me, I'd definitely try cutting the Losartan tabs in half for a few weeks, to see if it made any long-term difference to the home readings. If that caused a serious rise in BP I'd go back to the full dose. If not, I'd stay at 25mg, but without sharing this with my doctor. Then I'd take the full dose for a week or so before my next appointment to counteract the white coat syndrome and avoid being prescribed a different drug! It could be that 25mg will be enough if combined with magnesium, but don't forget it takes quite a while for the magnesium to kick in.

As for the "well, you are 70 remark", it's actually true - many of us start getting BP problems around that age. My BP was fine - with the help of magnesium - till I hit 70 then, right on cue, I started getting the high pulse pressure thing.

I personally think the over-linking of raised BP with type 2 diabetes is just another fad. Obviously if you have high BP, poor lifestyle, are obese and your fasting blood glucose is on the high side, there is a connection. But... how can I put this without actually spelling it out and attracting unwelcome attention? I suspect there might be a correlation between the recent increased tendency to put patients on BP meds to protect them from type 2 diabetes and the drop in statin prescriptions due to acknowledgement of the serious side-effects they can cause.

If I find this post gone tomorrow morning, I'll know I have attracted unwelcome attention! But I've taken a copy and will send it to you by PM if necessary.

Thank you for your reply Lily. Yes I'm certain the 180 reading in the surgery was white coat syndrome, it always happens. I know the dr very well and it has become quite a joke but didn't seem to make any diffference when it came to rducing the dose. The fact was that it had registered at that figure.This time she didn't even take it twice and neither did she say the diastolic number. In the past when I've asked for the diastolic no.  she has been vague as though she didn't notice or think it important. This time I mentioned pulse pressure and found she didn't seem to know what I was talking about.  Is it that some drs do it all differently or what I wonder. You must think she's not much good but actually she's quite the best and nicest dr I've had in years!  One thing I did ask her was whether, if I was on different meds, my BP would fluctuate the way it seems to, especially in the surgery.  Initially 3 yrs ago they wanted to put me on calcium channel blockers but I refused them as you can't eat grapefruit, and I'm glad I did as I read all sorts of bad reports of them.

There was an interesting article in the Daily Mail [women's section] by a 70 yr old  saying how she hasn't been to the drs in years and has refused all the tests and scans offered by the NHS and privately too as she feels they are just looking for excuses to prescribe pills of one sort or another as they get paid for doing so. I've always suspected as much! She went on to say how so many of her friends are on statins and when she asked why most of them didn't know!  I could identify so well with her,  I wish heartily I had never responded to the letter I had from my surgery as they made a patient out of a well person I felt.

Thanks for all your help I'll let you know how I get on.

Hi Jane,

Not sure why your GP didn't seem to know about pulse pressure, especially as you described her in an earlier post as being quite young. I only caught up with this very recently, but that's because I trained as a nurse 50 years ago and left the profession 10 years later. In those days it wasn't an issue. We were taught that the diastolic value was much more important than the systolic, and the lower it was, the better. When my diastolic pressure started creeping down from 80 to around 65 a few years ago, with the systolic rising only slightly, I initially assumed that was a good thing!

I'm sure your doctor would know about this though. I suspect her refusal to discuss it might have been a misguided attempt to stop you becoming anxious, though I also find this a bit surprising in a younger doctor. In my day, of course, both nurses and doctors were taught that a patient's BP was nothing to do with the patient! We used the old-fashioned box sphygomanometers and were instructed always to turn the scale away so the patient couldn't see the level to which we pumped up the cuff (which gave an indication of the systolic). We were also instructed on no account to ever tell the patient what their BP was, to avoid worrying them. This in the days before home BP monitors were available, of course. But I would have thought that attitude died out years ago.

Though I always take anything I read in the Daily Mail with a large pinch of salt, I have some sympathy with the writer you mentioned. In general I'm inclined to believe that doctors are best avoided as far as possible! However, even I don't live entirely outside of the medical system. I have an auto-immune condition which affects my thyroid, among other systems, and requires regular monitoring to make sure I'm getting the right dose of thyroxine (synthetic thyroid hormone). In comparison with many sufferers, I've been let down very lightly by this condition, and have frequently enjoyed long spells of remission. This might be luck, but I also suspect it's down to my refusal to take any medications for it, with the exception of thyroxine. (Rheumatologists invariably want to put sufferers on long-term corticosteroids, or even chemotherapy drugs to suppress our over-active immune systems.)

I've never done any cancer screening either, though I wouldn't ignore any lumps or unexplained bleeding. I figure we all have to die of something! That being said, I do get screened for conditions that could make my old age miserable without actually killing me: gum disease, glaucoma, raised blood sugar, osteoporosis, hypertension. However, with the exception of gum disease and glaucoma, I'd be more inclined to treat myself by life-style adjustments than medication.

I think an informed, middle-of-the-road approach to medicine works best. And fortunately, in these days of widespread internet access, we can all educate and inform ourselves.

Hi Lily, I realise that I hadn't replied to you as I thought. I've only just managed to obtain some magnesium 375 mg tablets from that well known high st chemist, they had previously been out of stock. There's no mention of lowering blood pressure, they just mention bones and teeth and tiredness and fatigue. I'm not sure what to expect and actually am I doing the right thing?

My prescribed dose of Losartan is 50mg and recently I have been halving the tablets. Not sure if it's the right thing to do or not and rightly or wrongly  I didn't inform the dr.

With all I've read and learnt from the internet I could kick myself for having had the NHS health check in the first place. 3 years prior to having it I asked for a cholesterol check as I was reading [Daily Mail probably!] that it was a good idea. It probably wasn't such a good idea as they said it was too high and recalled me 3 years later. Then came the invitation for a health check.and the hypertension diagnosis. I do wish I'd never known as I've never forgiven the health care assistant for looking at me witheringly and saying "Well you are 70" as though I was ready to be shunted into a care home !!! Unfortunately I can't turn the clock back and though I absolutely hate taking medication for anything longterm, it seems I'm stuck with it. So if I take these tablets how would you recommend that I approach it ?

On a different tack I see from my diary of BP readings that my 'pulse pressure' averages out at around 50 or below. Is that OK I wonder, however I don't see what I could do about it. I hope you're keeping well?

Hi Jane,

I envy you with that pulse pressure of 50 or below. Pulse pressure (the difference between systolic and diastolic BP) isn't supposed to be >40, but 50 is still pretty good for anyone over the age of 60. I wish I could get mine down to that level, it's more like 80 most of the time. 135/55 is a pretty typical reading for me.

I really think you're worrying about things too much. Going back to one of your earlier posts, I'd say your level of hypertension was more like stage 1 than stage 2. Stage 1 is normally reckoned to be 140-159/90-99 and stage 2 is 160-179/100-109. Therefore the BP of 159/84 you quoted from the 24-hour monitoring puts you at the top limit of stage 1 for systolic and only in pre-hypertension for the diastolic, which is the more important reading of the two unless pulse pressure is very high. We all make our own choices, but I have to say there's no way I would have agreed to take medications with a reading like that!

I wonder whether you have a BP monitor so you can check yourself regularly at home (which is also less stressful). Mine only cost £24.99 at that same chemist, and it's very easy to use. It only gives the basics - not like the all-singing, all-dancing ones that pick up atrial fibrillation too, but I believe they cost a bomb and you don't need all that if AF isn't a problem for you. (If it was, they'd have picked it up on the 24-hour monitoring.)

Up to you what you decide to do, but I can't see it would do any harm to try magnesium. It really isn't in the least dangerous, as long as you stick to the recommended dose. When I first told my GP I was going on it 20 years ago she threatened there'd be all kinds of dangerous side-effects, but I knew that wasn't true, so put myself on it anyway. Six months later, when it had brought my BP down to normal, I told her what I'd done and she climbed down completely, just shrugged and said it gave some people diarrhoea but to carry on taking it as it seemed to be working! I wish doctors wouldn't try to scare people like that. I'm pretty scare-proof but not everyone is.

Why not continue on half your dose of meds and take just one tablet of magnesium per day? If you're taking the ones I assume you are, the 375mg dose is made up of two tablets per day. And yes, I know they only mention bone health on the label, but people have been taking it to lower BP for years. There's plenty of info out there. The only side-effect you could get is diarrhoea, but that's not very likely on a half-dose anyway. I was always inclined the other way, so the very mild laxative effect was a bonus for me!

I'm a bit puzzled as to why you say you can't turn the clock back and stop taking BP meds now. You can actually. For anyone else reading this, I'd stress that this is a response to Jane, who only has slightly raised BP. I'd never advise anyone with stage 3 hypertension to stop taking their meds suddenly, as it could be dangerous. But at your level it wouldn't do any harm at all.

Don't be scared - you can't poison yourself with magnesium (unless you take the whole pot, of course!) We're talking about max. 375mg per day and there are people out there taking 1,500mg and apparently not coming to any harm! Not that I'd ever take anything like that dose, I hasten to say, though I have been on 562.5mg (three tablets) for the past three months in an attempt to reduce my pulse pressure. It hasn't worked, btw, it's just reduced both values by about 5mm, so I'm still stuck with that alarming pulse pressure.

Just bear in mind that if magnesium is going to reduce your BP it will take at least 2-3 months before you get any effect. It's not a medication, and the effect - if any - is very mild. You're not going to pass out with low BP as soon as you swallow a tablet!