What is Pulse Pressure?
Channel: York Cardiology
Date: 2023-02-18

Today’s video is on Pulse pressure  - this is an interesting easily calculable value that can give us helpful information about the overall state of our cardiovascular health.

Blood pressure is usually expessed in 2 sets of values e.g 120/80. The 120 refers to the systolic blood pressure i.e the pressure in the blood vessels when the heart is contracting - it is always the higher value. 

The 80 refers to the diastolic pressure - the pressure in the blood vessels when the heart is relaxing and hence the diastolic pressure is always the lower value of the two. 

If you minus the diastolic from the systolic numbers, you get a third value. This is called the pulse pressure and is a reading that can provide even more information about the overall health of our vascular system. So if your systolic is 120 and your diastolic is 80 then the pulse pressure is 40. 

In general if the pulse pressure is less than 25% of the the systolic reading then it is considered to be low and if the pulse pressure is more than 100mmHg  then it is considered to be high.

So in our example if the blood pressure was 120/100 then the pulse pressure is 20 which is less than 25% of the systolic then it is considered too low. On the other hand if the blood pressure was 120/15 then the pulse pressure would be considered excessively wide because it is above 100.

Different conditions may cause the pulse pressure to be too low or too high but to understand how these conditions affect the pulse pressure we have to understand the systolic and diastolic pressures first because calculation of the pulse pressure is dependant on the systolic and diastolic pressures. 

I will go into this in more detail but in essence any condition that increases systolic pressure without concomitantly increasing diastolic pressure or any condition that reduces diastolic pressure without reducing the systolic pressure will lead to an increased pulse pressure and vice versa.

Lets us see what factors govern systolic pressure first: