When healthy lifestyle changes alone do not control or lower high blood pressure, your doctor may prescribe blood pressure medicines.
These medicines act in different ways to lower blood pressure.
When prescribing medicines, your doctor will also consider their effect on other conditions you might have, such as heart disease or kidney disease.
Keep up your healthy lifestyle changes while taking these medicines. The combination of the medicines and the heart-healthy lifestyle changes can help control and lower your high blood pressure and prevent heart disease.
Talk to your doctor if you have any concerns about side effects from the medicines. He or she may change the dose or prescribe a new medicine.
To manage high blood pressure, many people need to take two or more medicines.
Possible high blood pressure medicines include:
Angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors to keep your blood vessels from narrowing as much.
Angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs) to keep blood vessels from narrowing.
Calcium channel blockers to prevent calcium from entering the muscle cells of your heart and blood vessels. This allows blood vessels to relax.
Diuretics to remove extra water and sodium (salt) from your body, reducing the amount of fluid in your blood. The main diuretic for high blood pressure treatment is thiazide. Diuretics are often used with other high blood pressure medicines, sometimes in one combined pill.
Beta blockers to help your heart beat slower and with less force. As a result, your heart pumps less blood through your blood vessels. Beta blockers are typically used only as a backup option or if you have other conditions.
If you care about blood pressure, please read studies about blood pressure drug that may increase heart failure risk, and findings of common juice that may help reduce high blood pressure.
For more information about blood pressure, please see recent studies that salt sensitivity may increase risk of high blood pressure, and results showing this program can strongly improve blood pressure, cholesterol control.
