Any time is a good time to take care of our health. Once a year, we should give ourselves a periodic check-up and see what state our body is in. Is there anything wrong with us, or is there a disease lurking in us that we can treat at an early stage. Some chronic diseases may not give clear signals at the beginning, but have dangerous complications. For example, hypertension, which also has a drug-resistant form - if untreated - increases the risk of stroke, heart disease and kidney disease.
Numbers relevant to health are the results of tests such as blood pressure, cholesterol, sugar, morphology and ESR. A healthy person should measure their blood pressure at least once every six months, sick people much more often, even twice a day, depending on the doctor's indications. Normal blood pressure values are: 120 mmHg, systolic pressure/ 80 mmHg diastolic pressure, we speak of hypertension when the result is above 140/90. Hypertension is called the silent killer. Many people do not know that they have abnormal blood pressure because they do not feel its symptoms and do not check this parameter. And this is a mistake.
Untreated hypertension increases the risk of stroke, heart failure, heart attack and kidney disease. If our blood pressure readings are abnormal, we should contact our doctor, who will assess the progression of the disease and recommend appropriate treatment. In the treatment of hypertension, it is also important to change our habits to healthy ones, i.e. a healthy diet with low salt intake, in addition to physical activity and the avoidance of alcohol and cigarettes. If, despite a healthy lifestyle and treatment with at least three properly combined drugs, including a diuretic, the therapy does not work, we speak of resistant hypertension. This is a very dangerous form of the disease, increasingly frequently diagnosed also in Poland. Specialists estimate that in approximately 120 million hypertensive patients worldwide, the disease is considered to be poorly controlled. Most patients with uncontrolled hypertension take three to five hypertension drugs, but this does not always have an effect. Modern medicine fortunately finds a prescription for this too. Among other things, patients can benefit from an innovative therapy such as renal denervation. This is a minimally invasive procedure; the doctor inserts a small catheter into the femoral artery in the upper thigh and injects it successively into both renal arteries.
Once the tip of the catheter is positioned in the appropriate place in the renal artery, a special generator is switched on, which delivers energy in the form of low-voltage radio waves, tightly controlled by an algorithm designed to deactivate the nearest nerve fibres. This leads to a reduction in excessive excitability of the sympathetic nervous system, which is a major contributor to chronic hypertension. Such procedures are already performed in more than 80 countries worldwide, including Poland, in selected hospitals .
