Myth Buster: Aging Causes Blood Pressure to Go Up

Myth: As your age goes up, your blood pressure rises to dangerous levels.

Facts: While aging does cause your systolic blood pressure—that’s the top number in your reading—to increase, getting older does not automatically push it to the high levels associated with heart disease, stroke and other serious health problems.

Robert Palmer, clinical director of geriatric medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, explains that as we age, “the connective tissues of our arteries stiffen. More pressure is needed to pump the blood. Some moderate increase is normal.”

Here’s an example: If your systolic reading was 109 units of pressure when you were a healthy 40-year-old, you can expect it to rise a little bit each year. If you remain healthy and have no genetic predisposition to elevated blood pressure, even at age 85 your systolic reading might top out at 120, never reaching 140, the threshold for concern. Levels above 140 stem from a genetic predisposition to high blood pressure and such risk factors as smoking, eating too much salt, diabetes and obesity.

The myth of inevitable hypertension and heart disease arose from an old assumption by many in the medical community that high blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke were natural results of aging, Palmer says. In the late 1950s, some of the first results of the Framingham Heart Study, a major and ongoing investigation into the causes of heart disease, revealed specific risk factors and dispelled the myth. Palmer says that even before the medical community wholly caught on that high blood pressure led to heart attack and stroke, “actuaries at life insurance companies knew. If your blood pressure was high, they red-lined you and denied you coverage.”

Today, while rates of hypertension remain fairly steady, the incidence of dangerously high blood pressure is decreasing. You can help control your blood pressure by keeping your weight in check, exercising regularly and not smoking. A range of medications may also help bring dangerously high pressure back to safer levels.

Siobhan Roth is a writer based in Washington, D.C.