Yes, untreated high blood pressure can shorten your life; if you are lucky.
Christopher Murray from university of Washington, Seattle first brought out the concept of DALY. Till then we, as doctors, believed that preventing early demise was most important agenda.
Murray conceptualised that in a society if life expectancy is, say 80 years, and a person dies at 70, the period lost because of his early demise is 80 - 70 = 10 years (Years of Life Lost YLL). Now if this person became disabled at age 50, lets say paralysed because of stroke, he is bedridden from age 50 to 70; the years lived with disability (YLD) is 70 - 50 = 20 years.
DALY (disability Adjusted Life Years DALY) is sum of YLL + YLD (here 10 + 20 = 30 years).
Death is certainly the worst thing that can happen to anyone; but in India, disability is a bigger challenge, since it creates a much larger financial burden for the family. The stricken disabled member don’t generate income but entails huge cost for treatment in the absence of universal free healthcare in India.
Look at the data published by Lancet.
The Y axis shows disability, the X axis death.
The two red circles; one show low-back-pain. A disease that is high on disability index but zero death (it abuts the Y axis). In contrast the other red circle is lung cancer. It has high death rate, low disability, because highly invasive aggressive lung cancer kills fast; before even disability sets in.
Now look at the same graph below.
Hypertension (high blood pressure) is at the top right corner. It has the highest kill rate (heart attack, cerebral hemorrhagic, heart failure, acute kidney failure) and the highest disability rate (Stroke and chronic Kidney disease).
In case you are still not convinced, come to our hospital dialysis unit or the physiotherapy unit. The disabled stroke survivor and the kidney-failure patient tethered to thrice-a-week dialysis will tell you their story and ask you to be careful. These are the people who survived a hypertension damage, and live to tell their story.
For a trained medical personnel with a BP apparatus, it takes under 5 minutes to record a blood pressure.
Provided you decide to get checked.