From your daily routine and habits to your health status and genetic heritage, many factors can raise your blood pressure. Obesity, kidney disease and being black all put you at higher risk, for instance, and can lead to full-fledged high blood pressure (hypertension).

Understand what your risk factors are so that you can help prevent or delay the onset of high blood pressure and its life-threatening complications.

You've heard it before — your lifestyle has a big impact on your health. It's no different with high blood pressure.

Some of the lifestyle factors that can contribute to high blood pressure include:

• Excess weight
• Lack of exercise
• Unhealthy diet
• Stress
• Tobacco products

The good news is that by making even small changes to your lifestyle, you can reap big rewards for your health.

Certain medical conditions can cause high blood pressure. This type of high blood pressure is called secondary hypertension.

Some of the numerous conditions that can cause secondary hypertension include:

• Polycystic kidney disease
• Cushing's disease
• Coarctation of the aorta

By effectively treating these medical conditions, you can typically get your blood pressure under control or even cure it.

Certain prescription medications, over-the-counter drugs, supplements and other substances can induce or worsen high blood pressure or interfere with the action of medications you're taking to lower your blood pressure.

Among these numerous substances are:

• Certain antidepressants
• Certain cold medicines
• Certain oral contraceptives
• Cocaine

One obvious solution is to avoid illicit drugs, as well as unnecessary medications. In addition, talk to your doctor about medications or other substances that could affect your blood pressure.

Unfortunately, you can't control all of the factors that may increase your risk of high blood pressure. Three major risk factors for high blood pressure that you can't control are:

• Being black
• Being older than 55
• Having a family history of high blood pressure

If you have any uncontrollable risk factors, don't simply assume you'll get high blood pressure eventually, no matter what efforts you make. That's not true. You may be able to compensate by changing the risk factors you can control.

You may find all of these risk factors daunting. However, even if you have uncontrollable risk factors, it doesn't mean you're destined to get high blood pressure. If you know what your risks are, you can work harder to prevent high blood pressure or delay its onset. And that means you can avoid or delay getting the many serious complications high blood pressure can cause, such as stroke, heart attack, dementia and blindness.