Is General Anesthesia Safe for People With High Blood Pressure?

High blood pressure is a serious medical condition and can lead to complications during medical treatment, including problems with general anesthesia.

High Blood Pressure Health Risks

• Untreated, high blood pressure can lead to numerous complications, including heart disease, kidney problems and stroke. The leading cause of high blood pressure is obesity.

Anesthesia Challenges

• High blood pressure increases the risks of many medical procedures, including general anesthesia. "Death or serious illness or injury due solely to anesthesia is rare and is usually also related to complications from the surgery. Death occurs in about 1 in 250,000 people receiving general anesthesia, although risks are greater for those people with serious medical conditions," according to WebMD.com. In simpler terms, general anesthesia may increase an already-high blood pressure and lead to a heart attack, aneurysm or stroke, among other problems.

Physicians Can Manage Risks

• Before you worry excessively about high blood pressure leading to serious complications during general anesthesia, consider that there will always be a team of medical professionals, including an anesthesiologist, who specializes in administering and monitoring the patient's reaction to anesthesia, during such surgeries. The loss of life due to general anesthesia is extremely rare.

Doctors Minimize Risks

• The medical team will monitor your high blood pressure not only during the days leading up to the operation but also during the administration of the anesthetic medicines in order to minimize risks. Countermeasures can be taken both prior to and during the operation. It is generally easy to reduce a patient's blood pressure during a brief period of time, such as a surgery, and modern medical equipment will warn doctors well before the patient's condition deteriorates to dangerous levels.

Serious Complications Are Rare

• While high blood pressure does make the administration of general anesthesia slightly harder to manage, millions of patients with high blood pressure undergo surgeries requiring general anesthesia every year. The safety record of the medical profession in such cases is nearly flawless, as evidenced by the numbers. So, do your best to bring down your high blood pressure but if you must undergo general anesthesia with high blood pressure, do not worry needlessly.