High Blood Pressure and Anxiety Term Paper

The Surgeon General’s Family History Tool is a great means of plotting out one’s family history. I decided to input my family’s history and what came into focus was anxiety and high blood pressure. On both my mother and father’s side, there has been a long history of anxiety and high blood pressure. I don’t know if these two things exist because of each other or if high blood pressure is a symptom of anxiety, but it is worth noting how these instances of anxiety and high blood pressure persist even through my own medical history. While the focus of this essay was going to be on anxiety, because high blood pressure is so prevalent and can lead to heart disease, it is important to couple anxiety and high blood pressure together to understand why they may appear together and what may cause such issues to arise in one’s family history.

High blood pressure can be passed onto family members that share genes, specifically share the same lifestyles, environments, and behaviors (CDC, 2014). Risk for development of high blood pressure increases based on race, age, and ethnicity. Black people for example, have the highest rates of high blood pressure.

The prevalence of high blood pressure (HBP or hypertension) in African-Americans in the United States is among the highest in the world. More than 40 percent of non-Hispanic African-American men and women have high blood pressure. For African-Americans, high blood pressure also develops earlier in life and is usually more severe (American Heart Association, 2016).

This could be for several reasons like obesity and diabetes that also run high in black families compared to Asian families for example, but going back to high blood pressure, it seems there is an underlying genetic component that may be due to how the body handles stress.

Evident in white families, stress and anxiety seem to often be coupled with high blood pressure. A recent journal article notes how stress management, specifically, reduction in anxiety, helps program participants improve their blood pressure lending credence to the idea that reduced anxiety and alleviate blood pressure. “Based on research findings, stress management training with spiritual therapy as a useful method of improvement of anxiety, quality of life and blood pressure in patients with high blood pressure” (Alhornia, Banjiamali, Bahrami, Hatami, & Ahadi, 2014, p. 1). If high blood pressure and anxiety exist within the family, there could be changes made to decrease anxiety (potentially brought on by stress) and thus improve high blood pressure. This provides a great transition point to the next section.

2.

Lifestyles and environment plays a major role in whether genetic inheritance poses a threat…