Daily HealthBeat Tip

Lower limbs, high blood pressure

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I'm Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

Having high blood pressure does things to the legs of older people that is not good. A study finds older people with high blood pressure lose some of their ability to walk.

Raj Shah of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago looked at data on 888 older Catholic clergy over about eight years. He compared their blood pressure at the start with such things as balance and the speed at which they walked eight feet. He found people with higher blood pressure wound up doing worse:

"High systolic blood pressure may be one cause of lower limb function decline. One step to reducing loss of mobility may be to control their systolic blood pressure better." (11 seconds)

The research, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health, was in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences.

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I'm Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: September 27, 2006

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