“They say in the morning when you wake up, that’s when your blood pressure goes up. Now what we need is some doctor to tell a patient how to keep that same level 24 hours a day,” says Lasorda. Dr. James Underberg of NYU Medical Center says, “They wake up in the mo
rning and they take their medication, and then if they are going to have their blood pressure checked then that usually happens at the early part of the day after they have taken their medicine, so what we are seeing is the immediate effects of their medication on their blood pressure, so we don’t in most cases get a good picture of what is going on with their blood pressure the rest of the day.”
Smooth 24 hour control of blood pressure is important because blood pressure can fluctuate and it can especially surge in the morning. That can increase the risk of heart attack or stroke. “Given the choice of a medicine that will control pressure through the course of twenty four hours I am going to want something like that as oppose to something that doesn’t last through the twenty four hour period and allows me to have the early morning surge,” says Dr. Underberg.
Lasorda’s pitch –pardon the double entendre--is sponsored by the drug Micardis, a medicine in the Angiotensin II blocking family…others include Cozaar and Benicar. But Lasorda is right, in that blood pressure control isn’t just about the medicine; it’s a lifestyle thing. But maybe Lasorda should listen to his own good advice. He exclaimed, “It’s just a matter of keeping your nerves down and don’t get too rallied up, like what burns me up more than anything is getting down from my house to the ball park in la.
It just gripes the hell of me to say where are these people going, why aren’t they working, why aren’t these people working, all these cars, and my wife will say, they are saying the same thing about you.” He must still be sore about losing to the Yankees in ‘77 and ’78 series. One in three American adults has high blood pressure. But one in three don’t know it. Go get your blood pressure checked, because this is a silent disease.