The Effect of Hypertension

Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is a condition that causes blood to flow through your arteries with too much force. This causes many effects on your body that can disable or kill you if you don't learn to control your blood pressure. When your blood pressure is not controlled, nearly every part of your body is affected.

Arteries

• When hypertension damages cells in your arteries, they harden and become thick. When fats from your food try to pass through these cells, they build up and block blood flow to your heart, brain, kidneys, eyes and limbs.

Heart

• When arteries that carry blood and oxygen to your heart are damaged by high blood pressure, your heart gets weaker because it has to work harder with fewer nutrients. You can have chest pain and irregular heartbeat, or suffer a heart attack or heart failure.

Brain

• High blood pressure damage to your brain's blood vessels can keep blood from reaching your brain. This causes brain cells to die. Blood clots can form in arteries to your brain, blocking them and causing stroke and dementia.

Kidneys

• Injury to blood vessels and arteries to and inside your kidneys can scar the part of your kidneys that remove waste from your body. When your kidneys don't work properly, toxins can build up in your blood. Your blood might need to pass through a dialysis machine several times a week to clean fluids and waste from your body.

Eyes

• Eyes can be damaged when the blood vessels that provide blood to the retina are affected by high blood pressure. The optic nerve can swell, bleeding in the eye can impair vision and nerve damage from blocked blood flow to the eye can kill nerve cells in the eyes, causing vision loss.

Aneurysms

• Hypertension can cause the wall of a weakened artery to bulge, rupture and cause internal bleeding. Aneurysms are most common in the aorta, which is the largest artery in your body, but they can form in any artery in your body .