Lower blood pressure of 120 decreases deaths, heart failures - figures revealed!

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According to The New York Times, the groundbreaking results of a new study regarding the benefits of lower blood pressure prompted the federal government to halt the research in September. But now, details about the study have been revealed.

The researchers found that blood pressure below 120 millimeters of mercury can be a great help in terms of preventing strokes and other related heart diseases. Before this study, doctors believed that lowering the systolic blood pressure of an individual to 140 or 150 millimeters of mercury is enough.

Because the federal government hindered researchers from bringing out the data and figures on how many people were saved by leading systolic blood pressure below 120 millimeters of mercury, both doctors and patients were left in the dark.

Dr. Harlan Krumholz, who is a cardiologist at Yale, put the concerns of other doctors in words. According to him, it is quite impossible for any individual to start making a change in the future when there is no sufficient data about what the researchers have found in the new study conducted.

A few months after the federal government withheld figures and other data regarding the lower blood pressure study, study investigators decided to get rid of the veil. The lifting of the study halt has been finalized on Monday during a meeting of American Heart Association in Orlando, Fla., and published in a paper "The New England Journal of Medicine."

It has been revealed that the researchers followed and studied a total of 9,361 hypertension patients for an average of 3.2 years. Among these patients who achieved the recommended 120 systolic blood pressure, fewer deaths and 38 percent fewer heart failure cases were reported, compared to those who only achieved the current systolic blood pressure target of 140 millimeter of mercury.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, systolic blood pressure is the second number that comes out when you get a blood pressure test. It is the higher one of the two numbers. It is the measure in one's blood vessels whenever the heart beats.

According to Dr. Mark Alan Pfeffer, who is a specialist in Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and who is not connected to the new study, he used to give his patient a good job remark for achieving and maintaining a 136 systolic pressure.

With current data, however, he would prescribe the same patient with hypertension drugs. "I would have lost the opportunity to help another human being," he said in the New York Times report.