Everything you know about stress and high blood pressure is wrong - Axios

Illustration: Natalie Peeples/Axios

Your hectic job, hard marriage, rebellious children and dwindling slope account? They're astir apt not raising your humor unit successful a medically meaningful way, according to the latest research.

The large picture: Rather than mundane stressors, the existent culprits are genetics and mediocre habits that are often linked to stress, similar overeating, smoking and hitting the bottle.

• Commonly prescribed regimens — specified arsenic accent reduction, biofeedback and relaxation techniques — aren't effectual successful lowering humor unit successful ways that confer wellness benefits.

Why it matters: Nearly fractional of U.S. adults person hypertension (high humor pressure), and lone 24% of those diagnosed person it nether control, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

• Elevated humor unit causes 12.8% of each deaths globally, the World Health Organization says.

Driving the news: While studies person shown population-wide humor unit elevation during the highly stressful COVID-19 pandemic, the rises were modest, doctors say, and apt related to radical getting little exercise, eating poorly, drinking excessively overmuch and seeing their doctors little often.

• "Our anticipation was overmuch worse," says Hiroshi Gotanda, an internist astatine Cedars-Sinai Medical Center successful Los Angeles who led a large-scale study of hypertension during the tallness of the pandemic.
• His survey showed that patients measured their humor unit little often during the archetypal 8 months of the pandemic, and that their readings were somewhat higher than earlier the outbreak.
• But the differences were "smaller than expected, astir apt due to the fact that of location blood-pressure monitoring and telemedicine," says Gotanda.

Many patients actually saw their humor unit readings improve during the pandemic — probably due to the fact that they weren't consuming arsenic galore salty edifice meals, says Samuel Mann, a hypertension specializer astatine Weill Cornell Medicine successful New York.

• It's a "medical myth" that chronic accent causes hypertension — occupation accent successful particular, says Mann, who reviewed dozens of studies connected the taxable and recovered nary meaningful correlation.
• "Yes, accent and affectional distress tin transiently summation anyone’s humor pressure," Mann writes successful a caller book, "Hidden Within Us: A Radical New Understanding of the Mind-Body Connection."
• "However, decades of mind-body probe person failed to corroborate that they origin sustained hypertension oregon that accent simplification and relaxation techniques tin pb to sustained blood unit lowering."

Yes, but: The aesculapian assemblage inactive hasn't wholly dispelled the stress-blood unit link.

• "Increased psychosocial stress" during the pandemic whitethorn person impeded chronic hypertension management, per Gotanda's study.
• A abstracted study connected humor unit levels during the pandemic, led by Luke Laffin of the Cleveland Clinic, reached akin conclusions — and besides cited "emotional stress" arsenic a imaginable factor.
• The American Heart Association notes that the nexus betwixt accent and precocious humor pressure "is inactive being studied."

New theory: While mundane accent doesn't origin chronic hypertension, repressed emotions — from puerility upheavals and different traumas — sometimes can, Mann writes successful his caller book.

• "I'm introducing the conception of repressed emotions and their effects connected our health, a conception that doesn't yet beryllium successful medicine," helium tells Axios.
• His conclusions travel from decades of interviews with patients who person hard-to-explain hypertension, who described terrible traumas successful their lives (from losing a kid to surviving the Holocaust) yet remained upbeat.
• Repressed emotions, whether oregon not we're alert of them, tin origin hypertension, migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome and different conditions, Mann contends.

The bottommost line: A steadfast fare combined with regular workout and bully sleeping habits tin power oregon avert hypertension, doctors say.

• Management of humor unit and accent "is truly 70% manner and 30% medications," says Laffin.