You won’t need a heart attack to convince you to change your lifestyle

High blood pressure is often preventable. In fact, if you Google it, the rules pop right up: Don’t let yourself get fat, eat a balanced diet, stop adding salt, exercise every day, and limit the alcohol.

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But like anything, even if it’s easy, you don’t want to go through the trouble unless you’re convinced it’s a matter of life and death.

Well now, scientists in London have made a genetic discovery that could help doctors tell you when it’s a matter of life and death.

There could soon be a genetic test for high blood pressure.

CBS’s Teri Okita visited Queen Mary University of London.

“Paul Bowers-Isaacson didn’t know he had high blood pressure until he suffered a heart attack 18 years ago,” she reports. “Now, scientists have made a discovery that could help patients like Paul.

“A team of researchers studied 150-thousand patients and found 107 new gene ‘regions’ associated with high blood pressure.”

The 107 new gene regions may help doctors tailor and select treatment in the future, and they also “identify the possibilities of us bringing new treatments to bear from existing therapies.”

And by reading the genes, researchers may actually be able to tell patients like Paul whether they were born with a tendency toward hypertension.

“Paul says he hopes the new research will identify others at risk, so they don’t go through what he did,” Okita says.

“Had I had a blood test and the doctor had actually said, ‘Look, you’ve got this and this and this and this, and we know what the effect of that is,’ I’d probably do as I was told,” Paul said.

In the year since his heart attack, Paul has made some drastic lifestyle changes by eating healthier, exercising, and losing weight.

So there it is. Thanks to science, soon you won’t need a heart attack to convince you that your blood pressure is a problem, you can have your genes scare you into making a lifestyle change.

Or, now that we’ve scared you, you could just start doing it now.

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