I am 66 year old man...BP 121/75...Excellent health....IS BP too high?

[Weck1947]

Hi I am 66 years old a runner...been running for 30 years...good health...6 feet 4 and 210..BP is 121 over 71...is this normal?

[LilBudyWizer]

Running just makes you well conditioned to running. Walking at a brisk pace for an hour a day will do just as much to help you avoid cardiac diseases. That blood pressure is nothing to be concerned about. If you think your blood pressure should be low because you run that just a mistaken assumption. That's, pretty much, like thinking you ought to have low cholesterol due to running. Nice theory, but no real basis for it.

Instead you should just expect to be in the normal range because that is what is normal. Your systolic is slightly above but diasolic well within normal. If you actually track your systolic you'll see it varies by 5-10 points. Take another reading a few minutes later and you may be a systolic of 110. Do yet another you may get 115. All in the span of 15 minutes.

There's a typical chart of blood pressure readings. That should give a good example of why one reading is pretty meaningless unless +/- 5-10 points would still be bad. If tracking it you got most of your readings on systolic in the 130-140 range you might want to follow that up with your doctor. He really doesn't want to hear about a reading of 121/71. That's like seeing him because you have a fever of 99.2.

[Kapalua]

LilBudy,

You feel his systolic is "slightly above"? Above what? That one time BP reading (perhaps his is an average of several readings, he doesn't specify) is perfectly normal. Also, taller men (6'4") tend to have a slightly higher normal BP than someone who is say 5'4" and same BMI. Cholesterol is lowered through a program of vigorous exercise in a more complex manner. See WebMD:

http://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/features/exercise-to-lower-cholesterol

[LilBudyWizer]

Above the line for normal and into the range of prehypertension. Now personally perfectly normal is in the normal range. Pretty much normal is pretty close to normal. Bad is you're above prehypertension. As far as that article you're reading what you want to read and not what it says. Nowhere does it remotely say you will have low cholesterol if you exercise vigerously on a regular basis. You have to be careful assigning meaning to terms like more. You double your chance of winning the lottery if you buy two tickets than if you just buy one, but that doesn't mean you have a good chance to win though it is more of a chance.

My HDL was at 10 when 40 is the low end of normal, the further below 45 you are the greater they consider your risk and they prefer you be at 50. So what was my risk at 10 and how much would it have been lowered by raising it to 12, i.e. 20%? It's now at about 30 so what's my risk now? The point being just how much leap you took on that article. The only hard numbers they gave was relative to an unknown number. Even with the unknown number you can't actually say what the risk is. You cannot convert the numbers provided by a typical cholesterol test into some absolute risk like converting pounds into kilograms. You, pretty well, have to pull teeth to get a doctor to state and absolute number for risk. That's with all their expertise. Yet you read that article and make huge leaps about what it means. No, sorry, running regularly 30 years does not mean you have low cholesterol, but it does likely mean you're in good shape for running.

[LilBudyWizer]

Just to be clear I did not write "that blood pressure is nothing to be concerned about" because I think it's something to be concerned about. I meant what I actually wrote instead of the opposite.

[Colinm39]

I'm 74 and hover around 125/75 and my doctor won't take me off my BP medication. The plan is to have me off it, and he will see how my reading is with my last 10 lb off, which will be my maintenance weight. Because Fitbit are using AMA guidelines for BP, your 121 shows up as pre-hypertensive, 119 doesn't, so the numbers men want us under 120/80.

It will be interesting to see the reaction to this article in the New York Times re BP for people over 60 have a benchmark of 150/90 and only needing medication if they have other risk factors. BP Older people

[LilBudyWizer]

Regrettably it's actually a leap of faith that the blood pressure medicine is actually lowering your blood pressure. The only way to know for sure if it's actually working is quit taking it and see what happens. No doctor will advise you to do that. They will advise you to take it forever because it might helping even if it isn't because they have no way to what would happen if you stopped unless you stop.