High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a big health issue that a lot of people deal with. Usually, doctors don’t know exactly what’s causing it, which means people have to manage it with medicine for their whole lives.
Now, scientists have found a specific reason why some folks have this problem—a tiny harmless lump in their adrenal gland is messing with their hormone levels. Understanding this could help us treat this kind of high blood pressure in a new way.
What’s Going On Inside Your Body?
For some people, this tiny lump is doing more than just sitting there—it’s making too much of a hormone called aldosterone. This hormone tells your body to hold onto salt, which can make your blood pressure go up.
What’s more, researchers found a gene variant in some people that makes this happen in bursts, making it tricky for doctors to diagnose.
Imagine it this way: it’s like having a leaky faucet that sometimes gushes water and then stops. If you check when it’s not gushing, you’d think everything’s fine.
But when it does gush, it can make a big mess, or in this case, boost your blood pressure a lot. That’s why people with this gene variant can slip through the cracks unless doctors test them at different times.
What Can Be Done About It?
Here’s the cool part: the researchers found that they could fix this kind of high blood pressure by simply removing one of the two adrenal glands where this tiny lump sits.
In fact, people who had this done didn’t even need to take high blood pressure medicine anymore for many years afterward. Right now, the tricky part is identifying who has this problem.
Typically, doctors don’t measure aldosterone levels as a usual part of checking for high blood pressure. But this discovery might change that.
Moving Forward
Because this is still new research, doctors and scientists have a lot to figure out. For instance, instead of removing a whole adrenal gland, could they just zap the tiny lump?
And how do we make sure we catch more people who have this kind of high blood pressure? For now, researchers suggest checking aldosterone levels in a more detailed way—a 24-hour pee test instead of just a one-time blood test.
To sum it up, this new finding is big news for treating high blood pressure. It offers a way to actually fix the problem for some people, rather than just managing it.
And it could mean fewer people have to live with the risks that come with high blood pressure, like heart attacks and strokes.
If you care about high blood pressure, please read studies about a common and unrecognized cause of high blood pressure, and this small habit can greatly benefit people with high blood pressure, cholesterol.
For more information about high blood pressure, please see recent studies about more efficient way to treat high blood pressure, and 12 foods that lower blood pressure.
The research findings can be found in Nature Genetics.
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