It’s an often expressed idea about medicine that if you have high blood pressure, the steps you take to lower it will have a dramatic impact on your risk for heart disease, stroke and more.

But a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study says that almost 70 percent people with high blood pressure are not doing enough to control it.

Dr. Keith Siller, who is medical director of the Comprehensive Stroke Care Center at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City, says: “High blood has links with stroke and heart disease, it’s a treatable and preventable condition, but unfortunately majority of people are not doing a good job for controlling it.”

Almost every one out of three US adults is suffering from high blood pressure and according to the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, a reading above 140/90 mmHg is considered  high blood pressure while anything between 120/80 mmHg and 139/89 mmHg is considered pre-hypertension.

Exercise, blood-pressure lowering medications and diet serve as mainstays for blood pressure management and to control their blood pressure a lot of people have to take a combination of medications.

The US government researchers interviewed 25,000 Americans with high blood pressure to find what measures they had been taking to control their high blood pressure. Almost 98 percent (almost all) told that they had been doing at least one thing to lower their blood pressure. While only 31 percent had their high blood pressure under control.