The normal category, I guess would be ideal.

- [Dr.

Surya] Correct.

- [Mark] For people to have, and then, as we go down, that's when your high blood pressure increases.

So let's talk about elevated.

Is that something to be concerned about if you have an elevated number?

- There's a great emphasis on this kind of category now because I would say that's the greatest opportunity one has to start changing things before things get out of control.

So elevated categories when your bottom number is normal, but the top number is not yet very abnormal.

So if you will, 120 to 129, but once you cross that threshold, 130 to 139, and the bottom number starts increasing, but it's less than 90, we term as stage one hypertension.

In stage two the top number has gone beyond 140 and the bottom number is starting to go beyond 90.

And then severe forms of hypertension occur when the top number is over 180 and the bottom number is over 120.

Now a lot of patients ask me, "Is it really 138 versus 141?

Is it that kind of a big deal?"

I answer that question saying what we have demonstrated in a huge body of science and over a long period of time from all over the world is we see a pretty graduated kind of risk worsening with uncontrolled blood pressure.

So you want to look at this as a continuum.

So if I am a patient today with a stage two hypertension and I have modified a lot of my lifestyle and I'm taking my medication, I'm coming down from this stage to a better stage, I am doing a lot better with my both quantity and quality of life.

- Sure.

As we go down the list, I mean, the final one is hypertensive emergency and those numbers are very, very high and I'm guessing you should be getting to a hospital very quickly if you have those kind of numbers.

- Yeah, depends on if you are symptomatic or you're not and whether you've had high blood pressure for a long time or not.

But if hypertensive emergency can be associated with some catastrophic health events like having a stroke in the head, like having a bleed in the eye and they're based on what other problems you have on top of the uncontrolled blood pressure, there might be an urgent need to drop those numbers and that might require intravenous therapies, et cetera.

So I would say that's something that you should not definitely take it easy on.