Guess what? If you have high blood pressure, you are stressed

It’s obvious: those whose high blood pressure just won’t go down are probably stressed.

More precisely, they have high levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, researchers from the Mount Sinai Hospital have found.

Around 27 percent of people with resistant hypertension, high blood pressure that isn’t helped by drugs, have high levels of cortisol (hypercortisolism).  It’s a common problem: around 10 million Americans have it, but the link to high cortisol levels wasn’t known until now.  Cortisol is a hormone that helps regulate the body’s response to stress.

The researchers have launched a new study, called Momentum, that investigates the role of hypercortisolism in resistant hypertension.  For their first trial, they monitored cortisol levels in 1,086 people with the condition and found that 297 of them—27 percent of the total—were affected.

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