blood pressure monitor machine showing a reading

elderly asian woman taking and recording blood pressure for her husband

Madam Malia, 71, just could not get her blood pressure down – not even after taking six different medicines for high blood pressure every day. Sometimes, her systolic blood pressure would be so high that her home monitoring system would go haywire, displaying an error message instead of a reading.

For more than six months, her systolic pressure hovered between 200 and 210 millimetres of mercury (mmHg) – well above the accepted 140 mmHg for someone her age.

Her daughter Madam Yusminah, 55, a trained nurse, thought her mother was, perhaps, not taking her pills correctly from the pillbox. So, she changed the way she packed them, using little plastic bags and labels in Malay. But faultless pill popping did not improve Mdm Malia’s condition.

What she had was resistant hypertension. It is a form of high blood pressure that does not respond to treatment, even one that consisted of a combination of at least three drugs.

Read on to find out how renal denervation can help lower resistant high blood pressure.

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