- [Instructor] When using the terms systole and diastole, maybe they trigger the thought or idea that hey, maybe this is blood pressure. Systolic pressure, diastolic blood pressure. Well, it's the same basic idea. Systole is when the ventricles are contracting, while your systolic blood pressure, the higher of the two numbers, happens from the contraction of the ventricle. So a systolic blood pressure is the top number of the blood pressure, or the higher of the two blood pressures, as measured as the ventricular is going through systole, while diastolic refers to diastole. It's the lower pressure or that bottom number. This happens when the ventricles are at rest, when the ventricles are in diastole. The way to measure it is a sphygmomanometer. The sphygmomanometer is that blood pressure cuff they put on your arm and you can pump up the pressure. What typically occurs is systolic pressure should be around that 120ish mark, maybe it's 110, maybe it's 125, it's all pretty much in the normal range there. It depends on the person. Diastolic, give or take around the 80 mark, 85, 75. But some people have varied numbers. A person might have a systolic pressure of 105 over a diastolic of 65. That's what you'd personally find because that's their normal pressure. These normal readings are just guidelines. It all depends on what you typically have as blood pressure, and what works for your doctor. So if you don't have a perfect 120 over 80, don't worry about it. What's important is as long as the doctor is happy with what the blood pressure is. How about hypertension? Hyper is high, so too much tension. Too much tension is not a good thing as far as blood pressure goes. Hypertension is a sustained high blood pressure. It's where your blood pressure stays elevated for days or weeks on end, even months on end. I put there the silent killer, because hypertension slowly wears down the heart. It slowly wears down the blood vessels. And you pretty much have one heart your entire life. You might, if problems arise, be lucky enough to find a transplant, but more often than not, you've got to keep that heart healthy. So it's hypertension. If you're treated by trying to reduce stress, yeah, that's a real easy one, sure. We're all stressed. Maybe it helps out with exercising more, something that most people can do. It could help out with eating healthy. It could help out with proper sleeping cycles. But sometimes none of those matters, because the hypertension is genetic. In that case, a lot of times doctors turn to medicine to try to help and lower the blood pressure. Hypotension, H-Y-P-O is low. Hypotension, the blood pressure is too low. You get dizziness, you might be fainting. It's hard to keep a balance. Now some causes of hypotension, severe burns, because you're losing fluid, blood loss, again, losing fluid, orthostatic. The idea here is all these are cutting down on the amount of fluid in your body, creating a problem where you cannot get the adequate blood pressure to the rest of your body. If there's not adequate blood pressure, you cannot get enough blood up to the brain. Not enough blood to the brain means not enough oxygen. Hence the dizziness. If you're lacking too much oxygen, you'll absolutely faint. It's your body's protection of trying to say, hey, get more air in here, breathe more. So here we have a sphygmomanometer wrapped around the arm. What it's gonna do is it's gonna be inflated to its highest pressure where it cuts off the blood flow in that artery. Then as the pressure is slowly released, the person listening to the stethoscope will hear one all of a sudden pulse, a rush, that's when there's enough pressure to push the cuff. It'll lower the pressure and also there will be a second sound coming through. That's when enough pressure on the low end of things goes through the cuff. So you'll hear as the blood first goes through, and then when it all passes through. That will give you your systolic, the highest pressure that pushes through first over diastolic, the pressure that goes through the end when it was low enough to let everything go through. Pressure is measured in millimeters of mercury. You might have a pressure of 120 over 80 millimeters of mercury.