What medications raise blood pressure?

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Some everyday medicines push blood pressure up, and the American Heart Association names the two hiding in your cold medicine: decongestants like pseudoephedrine or phenylephrine, which constrict blood vessels to clear your nose and constrict the rest of you along with it, and NSAIDs like ibuprofen and naproxen, which appear in many cold and flu combos. The AHA's guidance is direct: people with uncontrolled high blood pressure or heart disease should avoid oral decongestants, and both decongestants and NSAIDs were listed as medications that could increase blood pressure in national hypertension guidelines. The wider prescription list: corticosteroids, stimulants for ADHD, some antidepressants, especially SNRIs, certain migraine and immunosuppressant drugs, and combined birth control pills in some women. What to do with this: if you have hypertension, check combo cold-and-flu labels before buying, and ask the pharmacist for a decongestant-free alternative, which exists for most symptoms; if you take NSAIDs daily for pain, mention it at your blood pressure checks rather than assuming it is irrelevant; do not stop a prescribed drug because of this list, since the answer is usually monitoring or substitution; and if your readings crept up after a new medicine, bring the start-date timeline to your appointment, because that pattern is diagnostic. Home monitoring during a new drug's first weeks turns guessing into data.

What medications raise blood pressure?

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