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If your anti-hypertensive medication causes you to urinate more often than usual, your medication may be a diuretic. Diuretics are medications designed to increase urination.
You may be wondering, “Why would my doctor give me meds to increase my urination?” It may even be more baffling if you have never had a urinary complaint. Well, there is a perfectly logical explanation for this.
You see, your blood pressure is partly dependent on the volume of blood that fills your heart ventricles before it contracts (this is known as the preload). When your preload is too high, it can cause an increase in your blood pressure, and a major cause of very high preload is salt and water retention in your body. (Remember when the doctor asked you to control or minimize your salt intake? It is so that your body does not retain too much salt and water, consequently increasing your heart’s preload beyond normal).
When you do have high blood pressure, one way to control it is to reduce the preload by decreasing total blood volume. This can be achieved by increasing the excretion of salt and water in urine. That is where diuretics come in; diuretics increase the excretion of salt and water in urine. Hence, when on diuretic medications, increased urination is expected.
However, if the increased urination deeply bothers you, you can discuss it with your doctor and consider the possibility of changing your medication.
