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High Blood Pressure

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What is High Blood Pressure?

As blood travels through your body, it pushes against the walls of your blood vessels. This "push" is your blood pressure. If blood vessels narrow or your heart pumps more blood through them, blood pressure rises.

High blood pressure, or hypertension, can lead to several dangerous health conditions, including kidney disease, coronary artery disease, and heart attack.

Symptoms of High Blood Pressure

In most people, high blood pressure produces no symptoms. So, it’s important to have your blood pressure checked by your primary care provider now and then. Some people who have high blood pressure may experience headaches or fatigue.

UR Medicine's Treatments for High Blood Pressure

Heart disease remains the number one killer in the U.S., and the best way to beat it is to prevent it. UR Medicine’s Preventive Cardiology Program offers the most advanced, proven methods for preventing heart disease and enjoying a healthy lifestyle.

The first of its kind in the Rochester metropolitan area and surrounding region, our program features

Support in quitting smoking.
The Women’s Heart Program.
Diet and exercise programs to help you lose weight and reduce your risk.
Heart disease prevention for the whole family, including high-risk relatives.
Research and access to the most advanced approaches for preventing heart disease.

When it comes to diagnosing and treating hypertension, the sooner the better for your heart health. We offer treatment tailored to each patient:

Lifestyle modifications. One of the best ways to control high blood pressure is through changing some of your habits. Our physicians can help you quit smoking, begin an exercise program, lose weight, reduce stress, and control diabetes—all effective ways to lower blood pressure.
Medications. One or more medications can be effective, but our goal is to lower blood pressure with fewer medications:
Rheos blood pressure device. For patients with high blood pressure that can't be controlled with medications, UR Medicine Cardiac Care offers the innovative Rheos blood pressure device (and helped pioneer its usage). This small implantable device, about the size of a pacemaker, helps control blood pressure through electrical stimulation of the carotid arteries.

What Sets Us Apart?

UR Medicine Cardiac Care is one of the few centers in the Northeast United States with a clinic that specializes in the treatment of high blood pressure. The UR Medicine Cardiac Care Hypertension Clinic provides patients with doctors who are highly experienced in the treatment of uncontrolled high blood pressure.

UR Medicine Cardiac Care is one of only 10 centers in the world that uses the Rheos blood pressure device. We were the first center in the nation to implant the Rheos device in a patient with chronic hypertension.

High Blood Pressure is often linked with High Cholesterol. The Lipid Clinic at UR Medicine provides cutting-edge services to help people understand and control their cholesterol levels effectively. Excess cholesterol in the blood can lead to heart disease, which makes diagnosis and treatment critical. Our experts offer specialized testing and treatments, including LDL Apheresis for patients with very high levels of LDL cholesterol.

Our experts are involved in clinical studies to bring the most advanced treatments to our patients. As an academic medical center, we’re committed to bringing you the best treatments that aren’t always available at other hospitals.