How high is your blood pressure? It’s a question we should probably be asking ourselves more often given that 14 million people in the UK already have hypertension, 60 per cent of the European population will have high blood pressure by 2025, and blood pressure-related heart disease is responsible for about 40 per cent of all deaths in Europe annually. So if you are at risk, what should you do? Exercise works by lowering systolic blood pressure — the pressure in arteries when the heart beats, expressed as the top number in a blood pressure reading. Yet in a paper published last week members of the European Association of Preventive Cardiology (EAPC) suggested that the specific type of activity we do has a greater bearing

Source: The Times March 29, 2021 23:00 UTC