We need some guidelines to help us determine how best to treat blood pressure in the elderly. The medical groups say a sudden drop in blood pressure can cause fainting, which could result in serious injuries for older patients. A new guideline’s aim is to make it easier in some ways to treat hypertension in elderly, but not to treat it too aggressively.

Team@CMHF

The guidelines, released by the American Heart Association and the College of Cardiology, advise physicians to monitor whether hypertension medication results in a dangerous drop in blood pressure when elderly patients stand up. The biggest problem we have in elderly people while treating their blood pressure, if we overshoot the mark, orthostatic hypotension results. As they stand, sometimes blood pressure drops.

So we need to be really careful because one of the biggest risks is that a person falls or faints, and they could break a hip, for example, or get some kind of injury, so we have to really walk that fine line between treating, doing the right thing, but not overshooting it.

In older patients, we should actually have them stand while checking their blood pressure for one to three minutes.

It makes sense to have people stand and see if their blood pressure’s dropping. That might give us a better sense of how aggressive we need to be with treating their blood pressure. The new guide lines say that when people are 65 and older,140/90 should be our goal.

Reference: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/06/28/elderly-high-blood-pressure/