Dr. Sanjay Gupta

The doctor says, your blood pressure is up.

We need to give you some tablets.

tablets, the blood pressure goes down.

The patient is happy.

He's comforted by the fact that those tablets have done the job.

And he thinks that is no longer a problem.

But then you find that his HbA1c starts rising.

And then he goes back to the doctor.

And again, perhaps the HbA1c going up is another scream from that unhappy body.

So I think it's very important that we start realizing that some of these things are symptoms.

not conditions of their own accord.

Absolutely, because at the end of the day, if this is happening every day, the amount of blood getting to your vital organs is going to go down substantially.

That's how all these things happen.

So it's not a case of the blood pressure is not doing anything to your body and suddenly you have a heart attack 10 years down the line and someone says, oh, it's the blood pressure that causes this.

Something has to be happening on a microscopic level.

over a sustained period of time, and then it translates into macroscopic damage, stuff that you can see.

So dementia isn't a case of you're fine, fine, fine, and then something happens and you develop dementia.

It is a progressive, insidious, slow process that's going on in the brain that gets missed because the person looks fine.

You know, on the outside, the person looks fine, they feel fine, but what is going on in their bodies?

So if you look at hypertensive patients, for example, patients with true high blood pressure, and if you look in their eyes, for example, you will see evidence of bleeding within the retina.