Explaining high blood pressure
Ask the doctor
What causes high blood pressure?Three things affect the amount of pressure that pushes blood through your body: how forcefully the heart pumps, how much blood there is, and how narrow the smallest blood vessels are. That last one may need some explanation. When you're watering plants, and you want the stream of water to go farther, what do you do? You make the nozzle smaller. Narrowing the opening through which the water flows increases the pressure, and the water then is able to reach the distant flowerbed.
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