Prevention of hypertension and cardiovascular aging

Cardiovascular aging determines the health and lifespan in those who escape mutations and malignancy. Hypertension and cardiovascular aging are closely linked and hypertension, which is so common today accelerates stiffening of arteries and the cardiac muscle. This is the essential feature of both hypertension and cardiovascular aging.

The ill effects of stiffening with age are not apparent in early adult life since brachial pressure remains stable. After years, when pulsations cannot be cushioned in an elastic aorta, they can extend peripherally into the microvasculature, especially into the small arteries of organs with high resting blood flow, notably the brain and kidneys the high pulsatile tensile stress tearing the arterial wall and, predisposing to microrupture. It has been found that most of on hypertension and cardiovascular aging dependent stiffening of arteries and the cardiac muscle can be prevented by personalized life-style interventions or medication or a combination of these.

If cardiovascular aging of the population can be retarded by 15-20 years, it is, according to the US statistics 2019, possible to save in the annual cost of cardiovascular diseases in the age group 45-79 years about 130 billion dollars in US and two billions in Finland. For years the increase or decrease in stiffening has been possible to detect by measuring changes in mean values of QRS ECG voltages of left ventricular hypertrophy. However, even more sensitive to changes in arterial and myocardial stiffening have been found to be precordial T wave amplitudes and T/R amplitude ratio.

We in BIOPOTENTIAL have invented easy and noninvasive methods and devices to correct measured cardiac voltages in ECG for confounding factors allowing finding of quantitative changes also in individuals. Then the best interventions can be chosen to prevent or reverse hypertension and cardiovascular aging.