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Blood pressure is most often measured in the large artery in your upper arm with an instrument known as a sphygmomanometer. This piece of equipment consists of a squeeze-bulb pump, an inflatable cloth-covered rubber cuff, and a measuring device with a pressure gauge. The gauge measures millimeters of mercury (expressed as mm Hg). Some physicians use a sphygmomanometer in which the pressure is read from the height of an actual column of mercury. More common are sphygmomanometers employing a readout dial that has been calibrated against a mercury column standard.The word sphygmomanometer was derived from two Greek words: sphygmo, referring to pulse, and manometer, referring to a measuring device. Measuring blood pressure isn’t a new idea. The modern sphygmomanometer was invented in 1895. Other more primitive devices to estimate blood pressure existed before that.To measure your blood pressure, the special cuff is wrapped around your upper arm and inflated with air until the flow of blood in your arm is temporarily stopped. As the air in the cuff is released gradually, an examiner listens with a stethoscope over the artery inside your elbow for the first sound of blood flowing through the artery. The number on the gauge at the first sound indicates the maximum pressure produced in the artery each time the blood is forced from the heart into the large blood vessels. This pumping pressure is known as the systolic pressure. More air is released slowly from the cuff. Within seconds all the pumping or beating sounds stop. At the time the sounds become inaudible the number on the pressure gauge indicates the resting or minimum blood pressure, known as diastolic pressure.While both are important, your diastolic reading is more significant than the systolic, because the systolic level lasts only a short period, after which the pressure begins to fall rapidly toward the diastolic level. Your diastolic reading, taken when your heart is pausing, shows the lower but longer duration of pressure to which the heart and arteries are exposed. The higher the diastolic pressure, the higher the pressure against which the heart must work in order to eject blood into the general circulation. It is this increased heart effort and increased pressure within the arteries and arterioles that may ultimately cause accelerated and more severe atherosclerosis in the arterial system of the body and damage to the brain, kidneys, heart, and other vital organs.
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