Hypertension is a medical condition where the pressure of the blood flowing in the tubing inside our body is to high. Tubing is perhaps to simple a word, technically blood courses though our veins, arteries, capillaries and internal organs pumped around by the squeezing beats of the heart - all simple plumbing really.

From a simple plumbing perspective pressure is the amount of force a fluid exerts on its container, take a bike tyre for example, it is held rigid because it contains air under pressure forcing against the rubber inner walls of the tyre. If we reduced the pressure in the tyre by releasing the valve the tyre would deflate, we can force air into the tyre using a pump which will usually have fitted a device to measure the pressure of the air inflating the tyre so we can inflate it to it’s maximum safe rating. Any more than that and we can put to much strain on the rubber walls to the point where they might fail and burst.

Slap bang centre of your chest tilted to one side under your sternum bone is a pump, the most important pump you’ll ever own, it’s called the heart and its job it to pump your lifeblood through your body. Blood, carrying oxygen and other chemical travels around the body in tubes flexible walled ones like your bikes innner tube. It’s as simple as that, you can classify these tunes in arteries or veins depending on whether they are carrying blood to or from the heart, you can call them capillaries, etc. And as a matter of simple engineering all have a safe operating pressure rating – force blood through them to hard and they’ll burst or cause other damage to occour. This is fine when we are young and our tubing is strong but unfortunately as we age our arteries and veins loose their flexibility and resilience. As we age the heart has to work harder to force blood though to the extremities and as it works harder the internal pressure required to force blood around the body increases.