Page 40 - Men’s Health - USA (December 2019)

OU KNOW THE GUY. You work
with him, or you’re friends with
Y him, or maybe you even are him.
He’s youngish. Fit-ish. Flirting with
fasting and CBD. Always tracking his
steps, his sleep, his heart rate, his med-
itation streaks. But these trackers over-
look one metric: blood pressure. Those
two numbers measure how well your
blood vessels handle the 2,000 gallons
of blood your heart pumps around your
body in a day. And young guys’ vessels
aren’t doing the job so well.
190
Earlier this year, Blue Cross Blue
Shield released data from the claims of
180
55 million people in its Health of Millen-
170 nials report. One of the most shocking
stats: From 2014 to 2017, the prevalence
160 of high blood pressure in people ages 21
to 36 jumped 16 percent, and compared

150 with Gen Xers when they were the same
age, high blood pressure among millen-
140 nials was 10 percent more prevalent.
So what exactly do we mean by “high”?
130 We mean blood pressure that measures
above 130 systolic (the pressure in your
120 arteries when your heart contracts) or 80
diastolic (the pressure between beats).
110 And when that happens, explains pre-
ventive cardiologist Michael Miedema,
100
M.D., M.P.H., of the Minneapolis Heart
Institute Foundation, your blood vessels
90
stiff en up, forcing blood pressure even
higher. That can create stress on vessel
80
walls, leading to an ugly chain of infl am-
mation, plaque buildup, and higher risk
70
for heart attack and stroke.
For the longest time, most young people
didn’t have to worry about this. “Youth
has always been a relative Tefl on coat-
ing,” says Eric Topol, M.D., founder and
director of the Scripps Research Trans-
lational Institute in La Jolla, California.
Blood-pressure issues were strictly for
Great Millennial older people, and the idea that this protec-
tion might be eroding is forcing doctors to
Blood-Pressure examine what’s really going on.
Here’s what they’re fi nding.

Squeeze ALL THAT #WELLNESS ISN’T MAKING
YOU HEALTHY. You’d think customized
vitamins, kombucha, and cryotherapy
would get you to #peakwellness, but
Despite yoga, juice bars, stress-relief apps, and when it comes to blood pressure, they’re
the rest of self-care culture, millennials’ blood pressure not doing much. “With millennials, you
is going up. CASSIE SHORTSLEEVE investigates why hear a lot about wellness and not as much
it’s happening—and why you should care. about health—and they’re diff erent,” Levi Brown
says Christopher Kelly, M.D., a cardiolo-

38 December 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH