Can high blood pressure leads to cholesterol?

Answer 1

It depends. If we are talking about bad cholesterol, then the answer is YES. High blood pressure and high (bad) cholesterol are definitely connected. On the other hand, good cholesterol can actually help you attain a normal blood pressure.

When you are high in bad cholesterol levels in the body, chances are you will also have an increased risk of having high blood pressure. The reason is that bad cholesterol or low-density lipoprotein tends to stick to the walls of your arteries and other blood vessels. Doing so, it can drastically block the blood's passageways. This will require your heart to work doubly hard and the force of blood exerted on the walls of your arteries will be much stronger than normal. End result: High blood pressure.

Answer 2

Yes. One of the easiest ways to understand this is by realizing the association between high cholesterol and atherosclerosis and the contribution of atherosclerosis to hypertension. High cholesterol accelerates the progression of atherosclerosis, a process that's occurring within all of us (present in early stages even in 10-year-olds!). The specifics aren't relevant to this answer; what is relevant is that atherosclerosis of certain arteries is thought to contribute significantly to hypertension.

One example of this is atherosclerosis of the renal artery (called renovascular disease). In this disease, the renal artery becomes narrowed (or stenotic), meaning that the kidneys receive less blood flow. The kidney senses this decrease in flow and triggers a compensatory system to respond. The system heavily involves the so-called renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, which works through a variety of hormones to raise blood pressure in order to increase flow to the kidneys. The increase in blood pressure necessary to return kidney blood flow to normal is often much greater than normal blood pressure; consequently these patients develop hypertension.

Answer 3

High blood pressure can increase the likeliness that initial lesions will form on arteries.
Its at those lesion location where cholesterol can build up deposits narrowing arteries.