MEMPHIS, Tenn. — A local doctor’s discovery could change how hypertension and high blood pressure are treated worldwide.
The doctor teamed with others in the area to determine how low your blood pressure really needs to be to decrease your chance of having a heart attack or stroke.
Memphis VA Medical Center patient Sharon Atkins said she struggles everyday now because of a stroke she suffered due to high blood pressure.
She said she is thrilled to hear a local doctor may have found a key to preventing them.
“That’s an awesome task that he’s taken on, and I hope he’s very successful with his mission,” she said.
That doctor is Dr. William Cushman with the Memphis VA Medical Center. He began a study sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the NIH several years ago to pinpoint what level your blood pressure should be at.
“We really haven’t known how low to go. We’ve got studies that show that the top number, the systolic blood pressure, should be lowered to about 150, but we really don’t know below that,” Cushman said.
Now, he believes they do.
He said by keeping blood pressure levels around 120, patients significantly reduced their risk for heart attacks and strokes.
“What the lower goal group did was to have about a third of a reduction in overall heart events, stroke events, those kinds of things and also about a quarter of reduction in actual death.”
The study was actually supposed to go for a couple of more years, but Cushman said the findings were so groundbreaking that they ended it early.
Those findings will now have to be published, but Cushman and others are hopeful the medical community will use them to help patients live longer, healthier lives.
“We suffer with this around the world, not just here in Memphis,” Atkins said. “So, hopefully his study will benefit everyone that has this issue.”