HYPERTENSION: ACTION ALERT
Hypertension affects an estimated 50 million Americans – more than one in three American adults. It is the lit fuse of a bomb waiting to go off. Hypertension triples your risk of dying from a heart attack and increases your risk of stroke sevenfold over someone with normal blood pressure. Yet hypertension is largely symptom-free – until it’s too late. Hypertension is classified as a cardiovascular disease (CVD), a disorder afflicting the heart or blood vessels. According to 1999 American Heart Association (AHA) statistics, 58.8 million Americans suffer one or more of the cardiovascular diseases, making CVD an epidemic of unbelievable proportions. CVD mortality rates actually outrank our country’s next seven leading causes of death combined (including cancer). Every year 959,227 Americans die of CVD. That’s 2,600 per day, or 1 every 33 seconds, which accounts for 41.4 percent of the total deaths in the United States. Imagine, nearly half of all Americans will die from cardiovascular disease – and hypertension is a primary contributor to many of these deaths. If you don’t take control of and effectively manage your blood pressure, it will take control of you.
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