Are you at risk of heart attack or stroke because your blood pressure is too high? Find out with a “High Blood Pressure Risk Calculator” available on the American Heart Association’s Missouri Project website. Missouri’s Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention Program wants you to use it.
It’s actually pretty cool. Put in the normal things, your weight, height, blood pressure numbers, gender, age and it tells you if you’re normal, at risk or in danger.
A second calculator tells you what you can do to lower your risk. That’s pretty amazing in that just losing 5 to 10 percent of your weight makes an enormous, even life-saving difference. Then add physical activity and reduction in salt intake and you can stretch your life out for years.
At my age, 61, my male gender and weight, my BP risk was a bit above normal. But it said if I lost 20 pounds, walked 30 more minutes a day and ate less salt, my risk level would be normal. I knew this already, but seeing the numbers and graphs painted a clearer picture.
High blood pressure can kill. It does so by slowly deteriorating organs such as your heart, kidneys, and especially blood vessels that can fail and cause stroke and organ failure.
If you don’t know your blood pressure numbers, you’re in luck:
Jiffy Lube will offer free blood pressure checks Friday at five locations in recognition of National Wear Red Day.
People from Barnes Jewish Hospital will be at five Jiffy Lube locations to check blood pressure from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday. They include Jiffy Lubes in:
- Jefferson County, 1915 Hawkins Road, Fenton.
- North St. Louis County, 1755 North New Florissant Road, Florissant.
- West St. Louis County, 14701 Manchester Road, Ballwin.
- St. Charles County, 11 Jiffy Street, Wentzville.
- St. Louis, 4592 Manchester Avenue.
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I've written exclusively about health since the inception of the Health & Fitness section. I'm an off-road biker, altitude hiker and was into adventure sports until a fall down a Colorado mountain turned my lower back into abstract art. But I'm coming back. 
This is very useful article for all of us.I must say this tool has the potential to allow individuals to make informed judgments about their actual risk of having an osteoporotic fracture and what steps they may wish to take to reduce that risk.Thanks.
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Frankly, Baby Boomers are rewriting the paradigm. And at the front end, born in 1948, I can say this: The goal isn’t just longevity; it’s having fun until the day I drop in my tracks and have my daughter call the Soylent Green truck.
The old paradigm of wasting away in a rocking chair came from a day when we didn’t realize how much control we had over our own wellness. Now we know that more muscle, less fat, more endurance for the body, and pleasant activity for the brain, means you live better.
To reach that we should eat less food, and mostly dark green and colorful vegetables, walk 30 minutes a day, work crossword puzzles, read, travel, have friends, get sunshine, and stop worrying about things we can’t control. The more intensely we do those things, the better we’ll be and feel.
Longevity at that point will take care of itself.
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I used to think that aging automatically came with drawbacks like high blood pressure, weight gain and fatigue. I guess it was because that was something that I have heard so often growing up. “I’m getting old so I need to take an afternoon nap” is actually common!
Anyway, you have pointed out, along with a bunch of recent studies; that ‘aging’ is really just people who stop exercising and eating well. Good job. Here is another article that I read recently about the same thing:
http://healthwyze.org/index.php/component/content/article/315-aging-doesnt-equal-weight-gain-slowed-metabolism-poor-health-or-fatigue.html
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