What Is Normal Blood Pressure?

Dr. B M Hegde questions the need to treat blood pressure when there is no fixed definition of what normal blood pressure means.

- Dr. B M Hegde

I have been wondering about what defines normal blood pressure for the last 60 years ever since I joined the MBBS class in 1956. How did they find out the normal level in the first place? My teacher was not able to answer that to my satisfaction although she did not like my interference. Luckily those days the normal levels were much higher than now. I grew up in medicine and at some stage became a member of the International Society of Hypertension and met some of the ‘top’ hypertensionologists to rub shoulders with them on an equal footing. None of them could quench my thirst.

In the meantime I was doing my own research and have published some of them since. I have also written a book on hypertension in 1996 with a foreword by one of the leading lights in the field, Barry Hoffbrand, the then editor of the British Postgraduate Medical Journal. Last month came another thunderbolt of a study proclaiming to the wide world that even ‘normal’ blood pressure needs to be treated with antihypertensive drugs to lower CVS and CNS mortalities and morbidities! On this side of the Atlantic an ethnic Indian researcher was presenting a paper in the European Hypertension Society meeting, another study which shouts at the top voice that a deadly combination of hypertension and depression kills millions in this world due to heart and brain attacks.