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Find out what vitamin D is and what it does in your body, what foods provide it, and about vitamin D supplements.

Your doctor may recommend healthy lifestyle changes, medicines, or other treatments aimed at keeping your symptoms from getting worse, increasing your ability to exercise, improving heart function, and ensuring a better quality of life. There is no cure for pulmonary hypertension unless chronic blood clots in the lungs are the cause.

Your age, environment, family history and genetics, lifestyle habits, medicines you are taking, other medical conditions, and sex can raise your risk of pulmonary hypertension.

Signs and symptoms of pulmonary hypertension are sometimes hard to recognize, because they are similar to those of other medical conditions. People may have symptoms for years before being diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. These symptoms may get worse over time and could eventually lead to serious complications such as right heart failure.

Your genes or other medical conditions can cause pulmonary hypertension. Certain medical conditions can damage, change, or block the blood vessels of the pulmonary arteries. The cause of pulmonary hypertension is not always clear.

For most people with high blood pressure, a doctor will develop a treatment plan that may include heart-healthy lifestyle changes alone or with medicines. Heart-healthy lifestyle changes, such as heart-healthy eating, can be highly effective in treating high blood pressure.

It is important to have regular blood pressure readings taken and to know your numbers, because high blood pressure usually does not cause symptoms until serious complications occur. Undiagnosed or uncontrolled high blood pressure can cause complications such as chronic kidney disease, heart attack, heart failure, stroke, and possibly vascular dementia.

Everyone age 3 or older should have their blood pressure checked by a healthcare provider at least once a year. Healthy lifestyle changes can help prevent high blood pressure from developing.

Factors that increase your risk for high blood pressure include unhealthy lifestyle habits such as eating too much sodium, drinking too much alcohol, and being physically inactive. Other risk factors include age, family history and genetics, race and ethnicity, and sex.

What you don’t know about high blood pressure could hurt you. High blood pressure affects one in three Americans,1 yet many people with the condition don’t know they have it.