How Blood Sugar Levels Affect Blood Pressure

High blood sugar levels cause widespread damage to your body, including blood vessels and organs that play a key role in maintaining your blood pressure.

Let's take a closer look at how blood sugar levels affect our blood pressure.

Importance of Testing Your Blood Sugar

It is essential to get your blood sugar tested regularly. Not only does this help diagnosis (if you are pre-diabetic or diabetic) but it also provides useful information for diabetes management. Timely intervention helps to reduce unpleasant symptoms of high or low glucose levels, one being high blood pressure.

Diet control is vital for lowering blood sugar—you need to be aware of what food and drinks to avoid.

The Relationship Between Blood Sugar and Blood Pressure

When your blood sugar goes up, your body releases insulin, the hormone that helps the body cells take on the sugar for energy. However, consistently high sugar in the blood can result in high insulin all the time, which can trigger a cascade of effects that automatically increase your blood pressure.

High blood sugar causes high blood pressure. This is mainly due to the high concentration of insulin in your system (1)(2).

High insulin spikes the sympathetic nervous system, which is a fight or flight response of the body that automatically increases your blood pressure. Additionally, high insulin blocks the body's ability to make nitric oxide, a necessary compound that helps your blood vessels expand—this also increases the risk of high blood pressure.

Constantly high insulin in the system also hardens your arteries, which disrupts the endothelial layer of your arteries and triggers a cascade effect of cholesterol and calcium to accumulate in the arteries. The narrowing of the arteries limits the blood flow throughout the body, causing the blood pressure to shoot up.

The other mechanism through which high insulin causes high blood pressure is by increasing the reabsorption of sodium by the kidney. This causes fluid retention that raises your blood pressure and forces your heart to work harder.

Aside from blood sugar, there are also many other causes of high blood pressure.

Medical Disclaimer

The information provided by DarioHealth Corp. programs is general in nature and is not meant to replace the advice or care you get from your doctor or other health care professional.

Resources

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7512468/
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3996172/

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