There are situations, however, when your blood pressure can shoot up suddenly, called malignant hypertension. This can occur silently and without symptoms, causing silent damage to your body. Fortunately, malignant hypertension is sometimes accompanied by symptoms such as headaches, visual changes such as blurriness, lightheadedness, dizziness, sweating, nausea, or chest pain. In any situation where you feel the severe and sudden onset of these symptoms, it would be prudent to seek medical attention. For one, if it is severe hypertension, there are effective medications that can be administered to you to bring your blood pressure to within safe range. For another, these can also be the presenting symptoms of a heart attack; and time is of the essence in the proper diagnosis and management of such acute coronary syndromes.
If you know that you have hypertension and you and your doctor are in the process of finding the right combination of medications to bring your blood pressure under control, a practical thing to do is to obtain a home blood pressure monitor. There are several varieties of differing qualities available in local drug stores. They become useful when you test it for accuracy against the blood pressure reading that your doctor obtains in the office. Even accounting for slight variations in quality, it can then help you to monitor your blood pressure at home, and allow you to participate actively in monitoring your blood pressure, and assessing when there are severe swings of blood pressure about which you should contact a health professional.
