Blood Pressure Spikes At Night, Why?

In reply to Happystrings55 (Pennsylvania ),

One possible reason for your nocturnal hypertension, may be a lack of melatonin production at night. Melatonin can affect blood pressure and a lack of melatonin production at night can cause blood pressure to rise.

To help your body produce melatonin at night, it may be helpful to make your bedroom as dark as possible before going to sleep. Even small amounts of light from a clock radio, heated blanket controller or window coverings that allow outside light sources in can hinder melatonin production.

Other things you can do to help your pineal gland produce melatonin at night is avoid using your computer or tv at least an hour or two before bed and avoid bright lighting as these can trick your body into thinking that it is still daytime which can delay or reduce natural melatonin production. All of these things are amplified as we get older because because melatonin production declines as we age and our eyes lose efficiency which can cause older people to use brighter lighting at night to try and compensate for eye issues.

If you decide to supplement with melatonin, you should discuss this with your doctor before doing so as he/she can advise you on the proper amount and type. Some people do better with time released or delayed release versions which try to mimic natural body production while others do better with regular melatonin. Specific dosing will need to be determined by your doctor.

Here is a short abstract that briefly discusses this issue:

[Melatonin and arterial hypertension: from understanding pathogenesis to therapeutic modalities].

[Article in Russian]Pal'man AD, Rapoport SI.

Abstract

Biological rhythms are driven by the hypothalamic circadian pacemaker. Its action is mediated through epiphyseal melatonin that transmits regulatory signals directly to target organs. Circadian fluctuations of arterial pressure suggest participation of melatonin in regulation of this important indicator of cardiovascular activity. Melatonin is a key endogenous hypotensive factor. Some studies demonstrated that additional prescription ofmelatonin to patients with nocturnal hypertension refractory to traditional hypotensive agents significantly lowered arterial pressure during sleep. Moreover, melatonin was shown to exert meteo- and magnetoprotective action and thereby reduce the dependence ofpatients with arterial hypertension on the adverse environmental factors.

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Here is a link to a full study which goes into more detail:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4175768/

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Here is another abstract:

Chronobiol Int. 2014 Jul;31(6):779-86. doi: 10.3109/07420528.2014.900501. Epub 2014 Mar 27.

Association between light exposure at night and nighttime blood pressure in the elderly independent of nocturnal urinary melatonin excretion.

Obayashi K1, Saeki K, Iwamoto J, Ikada Y, Kurumatani N.

Abstract

Circadian misalignment between internal and environmental rhythms dysregulates blood pressure (BP) variability because of disruption of the biological clock, resulting in increased nighttime BP. Although exposure to light-at-night is associated with the circadian misalignment, it remains unclear whether exposure to light-at-night in home settings is associated with nighttime BP. In this cross-sectional analysis of 528 elderly individuals (mean age: 72.8 years), we measured bedroom light intensity at 1-min intervals on two consecutive nights along with ambulatory BP, overnight urinary melatonin excretion and actigraphy. With regard to adjusted mean comparisons using analysis of covariance, the light-at-night group (average: ≥5 lux; n = 109) showed significantly higher nighttime systolic BP (SBP; adjusted mean: 120.8 vs. 116.5 mmHg, p = 0.01) and diastolic BP (70.1 vs. 67.1 mmHg, p < 0.01) compared with the Darker group (average: <5 lux; n = 419) independently of potential confounding factors including overnight urinary melatonin excretion and actigraphic sleep quality. We observed consistent associations between light-at-night and nighttime BP in different cutoff values for light-at-night intensity (i.e. 3 and 10 lux). In conclusion, exposure to light-at-night in home settings is significantly associated with increased nighttime BP in elderly individuals independently of overnight urinary melatonin excretion. A 4.3 mmHg increase in nighttime SBP is associated with a 6.1% increase in total mortality, which corresponds to approximately 10 000 annual excess deaths in Japanese elderly population.

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Art