This week I am again writing about blood pressure, diabetes and the metabolic syndrome.
Each week I see patients who have recently been examined by their primary doctors and are told that have findings of high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar or both.
They are ill advised to return for followup in 8 weeks for a second test.
I am not suggesting that it is wrong to followup when you have such findings.
It is however foolish to make no management recommendations and expect a different outcome on a subsequent visit.
Often on the next visit medication will be prescribed as now there is a trend and not just a single visit finding which may have been just coincidence.
It is necessary to show a trend vs.
a single visit reading to prescribe drug therapies unless hypertension is severe.
It is reasonable that if someone is found to have high blood pressure, or, blood work reflects elevation in blood glucose, that rather than simply recording such data for record keeping that lifestyle modifications would be immediately discussed and proposed as being not only appropriate but necessary.
Again, it could be argued that simply having an elevation in blood glucose does not mean that you are diabetic.
Currently the diagnosis of diabetes is based on a blood test called the Hemoglobin A1c.
However, if your blood test is demonstrating elevation in glucose, you are currently in a prediabetic state that needs to be addressed, not just monitored until such point that you definitely have diabetes, as is the case with an enormous number of Americans.
If you have either elevated blood glucose or high blood pressure there are definitive lifestyle changes that you need to be making, now, not later.
These changes do not merely mean kicking back and awaiting a drug therapy.
It is this combination of blood glucose elevation and hypertension that constitutes the metabolic syndrome, a leading cause of disabilities, stroke, heart disease and death in this country, and it is getting worse each year despite drug therapies.
When I meet with my patients I routinely discuss all aspects of their health.
Most patients come to see me for dizziness and balance problems as well as other brain based disorders, but this doesn't mean that I can't help them get their life back if they are dangerously hypertense or prediabetic.
In fact, I believe it is my job.
Each week I see patients who have recently been examined by their primary doctors and are told that have findings of high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar or both.
They are ill advised to return for followup in 8 weeks for a second test.
I am not suggesting that it is wrong to followup when you have such findings.
It is however foolish to make no management recommendations and expect a different outcome on a subsequent visit.
Often on the next visit medication will be prescribed as now there is a trend and not just a single visit finding which may have been just coincidence.
It is necessary to show a trend vs.
a single visit reading to prescribe drug therapies unless hypertension is severe.
It is reasonable that if someone is found to have high blood pressure, or, blood work reflects elevation in blood glucose, that rather than simply recording such data for record keeping that lifestyle modifications would be immediately discussed and proposed as being not only appropriate but necessary.
Again, it could be argued that simply having an elevation in blood glucose does not mean that you are diabetic.
Currently the diagnosis of diabetes is based on a blood test called the Hemoglobin A1c.
However, if your blood test is demonstrating elevation in glucose, you are currently in a prediabetic state that needs to be addressed, not just monitored until such point that you definitely have diabetes, as is the case with an enormous number of Americans.
If you have either elevated blood glucose or high blood pressure there are definitive lifestyle changes that you need to be making, now, not later.
These changes do not merely mean kicking back and awaiting a drug therapy.
It is this combination of blood glucose elevation and hypertension that constitutes the metabolic syndrome, a leading cause of disabilities, stroke, heart disease and death in this country, and it is getting worse each year despite drug therapies.
When I meet with my patients I routinely discuss all aspects of their health.
Most patients come to see me for dizziness and balance problems as well as other brain based disorders, but this doesn't mean that I can't help them get their life back if they are dangerously hypertense or prediabetic.
In fact, I believe it is my job.
SHARE
