Know Your Number’s Week at MSB

What is Know Your Numbers Week?

Know Your Numbers Week is a campaign that started in 2007, by Blood Pressure UK. It is a week in September that is promoted annually to raise awareness of our biological age and the importance of early detection.

High blood pressure is known as the “silent killer” and usually does not show any outward symptoms.

Why is it important?

This year’s theme is “Looking for the Missing Millions”.

Right now, 5 million UK adults aged 18-64 may have undiagnosed high blood pressure – increasing their risk of heart attack, stroke, and kidney disease.

When we can’t see something wrong, we usually ignore it.

We’re all guilty of overlooking things like lethargy, pains and aches, especially because we work in fast paced and sometimes stressful environments. Some days we can be sat for hours straight at our desks and just assume the aches and lethargy relate to that. But just assuming is not enough.

We cannot outwardly see our blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels. But these factors, amongst others are high risk factors in heart disease.

In fact, the biggest killer in the UK is Coronary Heart Disease (CHD).

A report from the British Heart Foundation (BHF) published in 1998 reported 175,793 deaths from CHD alone.

Ten years later in 2008, the BHF reported deaths from CHD were down to 88,236.

This fall in deaths is a combination of greater public awareness and understanding of risk factors related to CHD. The BHF, along with the Government, have put policies in place encouraging and helping people to lead healthier lifestyles. This, coupled with improved treatment and better health education has prevented the onset of CHD.

One of the keys to better health is empowerment – understanding, monitoring and reversing our biomarkers to enjoy better health.

From this comes vitality, productivity and happiness.

The importance of Know Your Numbers week is addressing the problem related to biological markers. Knowing and understanding them can reduce the burden of chronic diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Early detection can help us manage these numbers and ultimately the onset of chronic diseases.

Know Your Numbers has had great success on raising awareness for the general public. Blood Pressure UK stated that by 2019, the impact of the event was so effective that people were buying blood pressure monitors for home blood pressure monitoring.

They also stated that this early identification and detection of high blood pressure reduced risk related to strokes, heart attacks and kidney failure. People were able to measure, monitor and reverse their biological age by simply measuring their blood pressure, blood sugar and BMI and gaining advice on simple lifestyle changes.

How MSB are getting involved

MSB have been participating in raising awareness of Know Your Numbers Week since 2023, as part of our continuous commitment to employee wellbeing.

We are actively encouraging our staff to Know Their Numbers so we can each identify any health concerns we may have. The law can be a fast-paced profession, and sometimes we need a reminder to slow down and take care of ourselves too.

MSB have blood pressure machines in all of their offices so that staff can take and record their blood pressure as and when they need and we have had a lot of success in staff partaking in checking their blood pressure.

We actively encourage all to get involved with Know Your Numbers and start taking steps to better health and vitality.