Under pressure

A person's blood pressure is constantly rising and falling in a cycle as the heart pumps blood around the body through a network of tubes called arteries. The force that your heart produces in your arteries when it pumps is your blood pressure. We measure blood pressure at two stages in this cycle: the systolic blood pressure and the diastolic blood pressure. Blood vessels The systolic blood pressure is the maximum pressure exerted by the heart and occurs as the ventricles (a part of the heart that contains the blood at the start of the cycle) contract and force blood into the arteries....