Welcome to Dr Warrick's Podcast Channel. Warrick is a practising cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education work believes educated patients get the best health care to discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love.

Hi, my name's Dr. Warrick Bishop and I'm a cardiologist. Welcome to my Healthy Heart Minute.

We're often not sure exactly what causes high blood pressure. It can be genetic, you get it from your parents. And that's often a polygenic inheritance and no specific thing that we can target. But it is important to understand that management of blood pressure, one of the things that drives blood pressure is the way the kidney behaves. It releases signals. Hormoning signals to regulate salt retention, water retention, and so on. That means if there's a problem with the kidneys or one of the kidneys, then that particular kidney may be reacting in a way that it wants to keep the blood pressure up.

So there is a situation where if we've got a narrowed blood vessel to one of the kidneys called renal artery stenosis, that that lack of blood flow to the kidney can make the kidney respond as if it thinks there's just not enough blood in the body, leading to retention of fluid. And that retention of fluid, through salt and water retention, raises blood pressure and can be a cause therefore of high blood pressure. A very useful thing, if you don't have a narrowed artery and you've lost some blood on the african plains. But not so good if you've got a narrowed artery. You're otherwise fit and well and have not lost blood. The kidneys just can't tell the difference.

I've done a podcast on the very topic. Have a listen. From the healthy heart network, I hope you live as well as possible, for as long as possible. Until next time. Take care of bye for now.

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