Does hypertension mean taking medicine for life?

For many people who have found that their blood pressure is high, after completing relevant examinations in the hospital, the doctor diagnosed them with hypertension. If the doctor recommends taking oral antihypertensive drugs at this time, most people will have a question: Can I stop taking antihypertensive drugs? Is this true? Let's take a look together.

For this question, first of all, we have to understand that taking high blood pressure medicine is different from addiction. It is not because of antihypertensive drugs that you cannot stop taking the medicine, but because the blood pressure is too high and needs to be lowered by drugs. Then can you stop taking it after it returns to normal? When it returns to normal after taking the medicine, it is because of the effect of the medicine. If you stop taking the medicine, your blood pressure will naturally rise, so of course you can't stop taking it.

Hypertension is divided into two categories

① Secondary hypertension (hypertension with a known cause, accounting for about 5% of all hypertension)

For this type of hypertension, you don't need to take antihypertensive drugs after finding and eliminating the cause. The most common one is primary aldosteronism.

②Essential hypertension (hypertension with no known cause, accounting for about 95% of all hypertension)

This type of hypertension requires long-term medication, but if the systolic blood pressure drops below 110 mmHg during medication, or symptoms of hypotension such as dizziness appear, the antihypertensive drug needs to be reduced or stopped for observation.

The reason why patients with hypertension need to take medication every day for life is not because hypertension drugs are addictive, but because high blood pressure itself is an "invisible killer". Hypertension not only causes symptoms such as dizziness and headache, but long-term high blood pressure will inevitably cause damage to the heart, brain, kidneys, and eyes. Therefore, taking antihypertensive drugs every day to control blood pressure within the normal range will bring far more benefits than not taking antihypertensive drugs.

Warm reminder: Everyone only needs to understand one thing: taking antihypertensive drugs is to prevent long-term high blood pressure from causing damage to other organs in the body.

Contributing author: Luo Yue, Cardiologist, Jinshan Hospital, First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University

Currently, he is mainly engaged in the clinical diagnosis and treatment and basic research of diseases such as hypertension, coronary heart disease, and heart failure.

Participated in one Chongqing Natural Science Foundation project and published two SCI papers as the first author