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Old 10th Apr 2009, 16:26
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homonculus
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
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Blood pressure should and does go up and down with exercise, stress, time of day etc etc. We like to see that the resting blood pressure (ie lowest) is below a certain limit. If not you have hypertension.

When performing certain tests such as an exercise ECG it is important to get the pressure and rate up by a certain amount and then ensure there are no nasty changes on the ECG

However, this is totally different from how high you CAN get your blood pressure. If you are in a potentially lethal situation, your blood pressure will be far higher than the figures above. NASA recorded very high figures telemetrically on Apollo launches, but there is no evidence these are or were dangerous.

Whilst we work very hard with operations to control blood pressure this in the main is because patients with blood pressure/heart disease and in particular coronary artery disease can come to harm from high pressures. For pilots with normal coronary vessels there is no 'maximum', no need to worry or modify the pressure, nor any adverse conclusion to draw.

Hope this helps.
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