Hacker News Reader

Many people have very different responses to stimuli: Some people see a spike from salt. Many don't. Some see a spike from coffee, while others actually see a decline! I merely gave my own personal observations from my own rigorous monitoring/hacking regime. I found no "do this and improve nn mmHg" simple solution, beyond the stated observation about avoiding coldness. I have zero reason to disbelieve your own observations about your own carbon machine, however.

Some people will be like me, many others won't, but the real lesson is that there are no hard and fast quick fixes.

Certainly, but I'd like to see the methodology of your experiments if you're able to say that a stimulant like coffee doesn't do anything, nor exercise. It might not do anything in the short term, but I dare you to drink 3x your daily coffee intake and see if you can't see any change, or to increase/quit your fitness routine and whether it doesn't do anything over a year.

I have tracked by BP over 50 kg of weight change, and BP correlates really nicely with fitness level, stress, etc. even though trends are visible over months, not hours.

There certainly are no quick fixes, apart from taking a BP pill (I take telmisartan+amlodipine, the latter replacing a diuretic that made me drier than the Sahara desert)

I went a week with no salt (and serious minimization of dietary sodium), no coffee or caffeine of any sort, adjusted my sleep schedule to be idealized, no alcohol (although I was a minimal consumer already and now am a zero consumer), very little sugar or simple carbs, took potassium supplements, etc. After seven days my BP was just as insane. And while people always have a stereotype of people with hypertension, I've been very active and fit over my entire life.

I started donating blood -- some report it as beneficial to BP -- and the effect was extremely short lived for me and very minimal regardless. I still donate blood regularly now as I'm an O- and they remind me constantly.

People are different. Someone who has mild hypertension probably can tweak some lifestyle dials and control it. I had severe hypertension with nothing to point the finger at (e.g. obesity, lifestyle, etc). For whatever reason my body was malfunctioning and in a recursive death loop of escalating hypertension.

What is your diet? FWIW I'm in the same boat: both my parents have hypertension, one is a smoker, the other isn't, one is overweight, the other isn't. My mum has taken heroic hypertensive doses to keep hers at bay, for decades. I've been diagnosed with it in my 20s when I was fit as a fiddle... it must be a genetic component, though these days I do believe it's because of a diet too high in carbs than my genes can handle.

Have a look at the effect of fructose on blood pressure. Low carb seems to work well for me, but I'm not consistent enough to see my BP trend down to the point I can throw my pills away. I'm working on it.

And yeah, the entire salt scare is pretty much nonsense that's slowly being debunked. I have a friend who eats more salt than a goat, and he's got hypotension. Go figure. Hyponatremia is not fun, I tend to use salt liberally these days.

I was replying to another thread. I repeat here. My dad has hypertension due to [Conn's syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_aldosteronism). The only thing that helped tremendously was surgery.

You could of course argue that if he ate a ton of salt, his blood pressure would surge. But I wish he would've taken the surgery sooner rather than trying to out-diet and out-exercise his genetics as the diet/exercise had really small effect.

Isn’t being cold leading to an increase in blood pressure a well known physiological reaction to cold temps, that will spike BP but not be the under lying cause?

> many people have different responses to stimuli…

My favorite example of this is from figure 2g of [0]. It shows the time series of blood glucose levels from two participants after eating a cookie or a banana, and they have nearly the opposite responses to each other. It was the thing that convinced me that a ton of modern nutrition that isn’t personalized is basically useless.

[0] https://www.cell.com/fulltext/S0092-8674(15)01481-6

I'm sorry—30 mmHg?

Maybe I am misunderstanding, or there is something wrong with my own knowledge, but "30 mmHg" added to systolic seems extremely high.

I am currently an EMT-B student here in the United States, and taking vital signs like blood pressure is our bread and butter. We practice it several times a week, on different people with different body types and different blood pressure baselines. Anything more than ±4 mmHg in a manual reading is terrible accuracy, and anything like +30 mmHg probably comes from someone who doesn't know how to use the equipment.

But again, maybe there is something I am missing. If there is I'd love to be educated and hear about it!

It's not high if you don't know how to measure your blood pressure. Your BP increases a lot if you're moving around, and not properly rested.

When you're at the GP's office, you might have been rushing to get there, you do a minute of small talk and then they strap on a cuff and tell you "oh my, it's very high", this is the reason. And it happens so often it even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_coat_hypertension

I have seen dozen of times, because of effort, anxiety, whatever, my BP being 160/110, which drops to 130/85 after 15+ minutes of complete relaxation. Many amateurs (which apparently includes most GPs) simply do not let the BP settle. The medical value of tracking BP is to know its baseline at rest, otherwise it's a meaningless number.

Lisdexamphetamine decreased your BP? That's pretty wild. I specifically have to take by BP before my doctor's appointments to monitor it from going too high. This seemed like SOP for my doc.

If something increases heart rate, sometimes the body will vasodilate to compensate.

My heart rate doesn't increase with AMPH. It makes me calmer, which is literally why we're prescribed them.

Stimulants can act tranquilizing for some ADHD people.

And for some people, drugs like Valium act as stimulants. My dad had that problem. He also had two different medical conditions that were rare enough that they each got separately dramatized on "House, MD". When my mom passed away, I got a copy of his medical file. There were multiple binders, filling multiple shelves.

Just before our wedding, my dad had an crisis, and had to go to the hospital with an infection. He went to Johns Hopkins. They put him in the research wing. The doctors couldn't figure out what the heck to do with him because he was reacting so weird to so many medications. They ended up having to pump him full of vancomycin in hopes that he would last long enough on the three hour flight to get back home where his regular doctor could see him.

People are individuals, and their bodies can react in weird and unexpected ways.

Unmedicated ADHD causes a great deal of anxiety. Making your brain operate as intended reduces anxiety, which lowers your vitals.

That said, whether I'm oversensitive or more attuned than most ADHD people, I take a light dose, which doesn't turn me into a productive robot machine going 1000 mph.

Stimulants follow a U-curve, and I wouldn't be surprised to know that most people take far too much and have to keep increasing their dosage. A single 30 mg dose makes my anxiety skyrocket, I usually take 20mg twice a day, I've recently experimented with lowering to 15mg twice a day and I think I like it even better.

The takeaway is that people vary hugely in their sensitivities and the different medical histories behind the same condition. I know someone who is extremely sensitive to salt, and even on BP meds, they must have quite a low salt diet to control their blood pressure. Even though it isn't much of an issue for others, it is for them.

I think the problem is that you've been measuring YOUR blood pressure, but you should have been measuring OPs blood pressure.

Maybe if you did that, you wouldn't disagree so much?

Pulse pressure, systolic-diastolic, is far more important clinically than I realized.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482408/#

> - Also important is the delta between systolic and diastolic. Mine is around 40 mmHg, if it's higher than that, it's an indicator of a stress peak (bad sleep, bad day, overwhelmed) that usually resolves after a couple days.

Is this universally true or just you? Is there any source for this? My diastolic pressure is always in the normal numbers while my systolic pressure is borderline high, resulting in a pretty high delta (50-60 mmHg). Sometimes I also get numbers in the normal range for systolic pressure, but maybe 75% of the time it's a bit high.

Diastolic is the pressure at rest, systolic is the pressure during a heart beat. The reasonable explanation of a higher systolic than usual is your heart pumping more volume than usual. Usually and in my experience this means being anxious or not completely rested/sleep deprived.

> Lisdexamphetamine (I am diagnosed ADHD) decreases BP by 10 mmHg

Vyvanse saved my life.

Do you have a favorite device you use? I've been considering getting something "smart" to auto log my BP.

I have an "OMRON M7 Intelli IT" machine. It's a good brand.

Just to echo sph, get an Omron device. Don't waste your time and money with the many random brands.

Omrons are accurate and reliable, and most new models like the Silver have bluetooth and with the Omron connect app will share the data with Apple Health if that's your platform, or you can just keep it in the app and it gives you trends and insights.