When it comes to high blood pressure, prescription blood pressure treatment is sometimes required to keep it under control. But there are different kinds of blood pressure medications and it’s important to understand the basics about them.
Some medications used are called beta blockers. These are medicines that actually cause your heart rate to get lower. They also lower the output of your heart which will in effect lower your blood pressure.
Another class of medicines is ACE inhibitors. This is a drug that slows down the production of a natural chemical in the body that causes blood vessels to decrease. This actually causes your blood vessels to dilate which takes away some of the pressure.
Diuretics are also used to treat high blood pressure. These are drugs that help your body to rid itself of excess fluids and salt. These aren’t usually used alone, but as a part of a prescription regimen to control your blood pressure.
Some medications are called central agonists. These medicines prevent blood vessels from contracting so that pressure won’t increase. They take advantage of signals in the nervous system to do their job.
Alpha blockers are a class of drugs that cause the blood vessel walls to become more relaxed. They also reduce blood pressure but in a different way that the other drugs that have a similar function.
There are also drugs called calcium channel blockers. In muscles, calcium helps cells to create a stronger contraction. By blocking some, but not all, of that calcium the muscles can’t contract as hard.
Calcium channel blockers cause the heart and blood vessels to have weaker contractions. This lowers the amount of blood that is move through the heart during one contraction and lowers blood pressure.
There’s also a group of medications called vasodilators. These drugs specifically cause the blood vessels in your body to dilate so that blood doesn’t have as much pressure moving through them.
Sometimes you’ll be prescribed one medication, but when your blood pressure is very high your doctor may want to try more than one drug in order to attack high blood pressure in different ways. It’s important to have a discussion with your doctor to understand the mechanism by which they work.