For more 20 years, noninvasive blood pressure (NIBP) monitors have been widely used in operating rooms and critical care units to closely monitor blood pressure in patients of all ages. Despite the widespread use of automated blood pressure monitors, clinicians continue to deliberate over the accuracy and reliability of automated NIBP devices compared to other methods of blood pressure determin...

End-organ damage associated with hypertension is more closely related to ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) than clinic or casual blood pressure measurements. ABP measurements give better prediction of clinical outcome than clinic or casual blood pressure measurements. The technique of ABP monitoring (ABPM) is specialised; validated monitors and appropriate quality control measures should be used....

Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) is becoming widely accepted as a clinically useful tool for assessing cardiovascular risk in hypertensive patients, although it is not generally recognized for reimbursement in the United States. There are now six major prospective studies, all of which have shown that ABPM gives a better prediction of risk than conventional clinic measurement. A coro...

Hypertension is one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. Blood pressure reduction and control are associated with reduced risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease. To achieve optimal reduction and control, reliable and valid methods for blood pressure measurement are needed. Office based measurements can result in 'white coat' hypertension, which is when a patient's blood p...

Home blood pressure monitoring Shah and colleagues found patients with heart failure who lived in areas of socioeconomic deprivation were less likely than those in more affluent areas to be treated with recommended beta blockers. 1 We recently investigated use of home blood pressure (BP) monitoring in stroke patients registered at a deprived inner city general practice in Lambeth. In March 2008...

IN this issue Pickering and Harshfield review the use of invasive and noninvasive arterial blood pressure monitoring in ambulant humans. Their review is well balanced and comprehensive but is limited to the discussion of patients with hypertension. Although it is true that the Framingham Study, the Hypertension Detection and Follow-up Program, and the insurance industry data all show the powerf...

We have designed and fabricated the first single-wafer proportional micro control valve with built-in capacitive displacement sensing. The displacement sensor can facilitate high-speed active proportional control of gas flow through the valve. This is an essential requirement for non-invasive blood pressure waveform monitoring based on following the arterial pressure with a counter pressure. We...

BACKGROUND In morbidly obese patients, oscillometric blood pressure measurements with an upper-arm cuff are often difficult to perform. The alternative method, invasive blood pressure monitoring, can be difficult to place and is associated with risks. A wrist-mounted blood pressure-monitoring device, the Vasotrac, provides accurate blood pressure measurements in lean patients. Even in the obese...

INTRODUCTION Critically ill patients and patients undergoing high-risk and major surgery, are instrumented with intra-arterial catheters and invasive blood pressure is considered the "gold standard" for arterial pressure monitoring. Nonetheless, artifacts due to inappropriate dynamic response of the fluid-filled monitoring systems may lead to clinically relevant differences between actual and d...

BACKGROUND Cutaneous laser Doppler flowmetry enables monitoring of changes in skin perfusion by quantifying the phase shift of laser light induced by moving red blood cells under a fiberoptic probe. It thus can identify the presence of and response to a vasoconstrictive stimulus. However, aspects of the technique must be defined before it can be used with maximum effectiveness. We evaluated the...