Variations in blood pressure can be a warning sign of heart disease. Blood pressure is a measure of the force with which your blood pushes against the walls of your arteries and veins. If your blood pressure is too high, too much of the time, it can damage the walls of your blood vessels, causing blood clots. This can lead to a heart attack or a stroke.The new research suggests that Spikes in blood pressure indicates risk of a stroke.

Researchers found that people whose blood pressure varied the most (sometimes high, sometimes low or normal) were at six times the risk of having a stroke compared with people whose blood pressure remained fairly stable. Most of the people being studied had already had a stroke or mini-stroke (called a transient ischaemic attack, or TIA), so these people were already at fairly high risk of having another stroke. Also, people who’d had the highest spikes in their blood pressure were more likely to have a stroke, even if their average blood pressure wasn’t high.

Professor Peter Rothwell of John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK conducted study of more than 8,000 patients who had high blood pressure or a previous heart attack and find out that variability in systolic blood pressure and maximum systolic blood pressure are strong predictors of stroke.

Experts from Umea University Hospital in Sweden commented that guidelines should not be updated until results from clinical trials can be clearly translated into every day practice.

Professor Peter Weissberg of the British Heart Foundation commented that these researchers suggest that measuring blood pressure variability – rather than single recordings of blood pressure – may be important. The reason of why calcium channel blockers are best at preventing heart attack and stroke may be their ability to regulate blood pressure variability. He added that current practice is not wrong, but this might add a new measure to help doctors make decisions on who to treat for hypertension and which drug to use.

If you’re already being treated for high blood pressure, it’s worth knowing that some drugs work better than others to prevent a stroke.