Blood Pressure Facts
Glossary of terms

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Blood pressure is basically a simple thing. Your doctor measures it to determine how strongly the blood is pumping through your veins. This gives the doctor a general idea of the health of your veins and heart. Most of the time, this system works perfectly, but a few things can cause difficulties.

The pressure of the circulating blood decreases as blood moves through veins, arteries, arterioles, and capillaries; the term blood pressure generally refers to is arterial pressure, i.e., the pressure in the larger arteries, arteries are the blood vessels which take blood away from the heart.

Arterial pressure: is most commonly measured via a sphygmomanometer, which uses the height of a column of mercury to reflect the circulating pressure (see Non-invasive measurement). Although many modern vascular pressure devices no longer use mercury, vascular pressure values are still universally reported in millimeters of mercury (mmHg).

The systolic arterial pressure: is defined as the peak pressure in the arteries, which occurs near the beginning of the cardiac cycle; the diastolic arterial pressure is the lowest pressure (at the resting phase of the cardiac cycle).

Typical values for a resting, healthy adult human are approximately 120 mmHg (16 kPa) systolic and 80 mmHg (11 kPa) diastolic (written as 120/80 mmHg, and spoken as "one twenty over eighty") with large individual variations. These measures of arterial pressure are not static, but undergo natural variations from one heartbeat to another and throughout the day (in a circadian rhythm); they also change in response to stress, nutritional factors, drugs, or disease.

The average pressure: throughout the cardiac cycle is reported as mean arterial pressure; the pulse pressure reflects the difference between the maximum and minimum pressures measured.

Hypertension: refers to arterial pressure being abnormally high, as opposed to hypotension, when it is abnormally low. Along with body temperature, blood pressure measurements are the most commonly measured physiological parameters.

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