Conventional clinic measurement of blood pressure has many deficiencies, among which the most significant are its inability to indicate the duration of drug effect, or the influence of antihypertensive drugs on nocturnal blood pressure. The technique is, therefore, unreliable for assessing antihypertensive drug efficacy, either in clinical practice or hypertension research. Non-invasive 24 h am...

cialist in critical care, neurosciences, and bariatric surgery at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, California. from a practical standpoint, is that the arms of obese people are no longer than the arms of nonobese persons of a similar height. Because of this discrepancy, following the standard for selecting cuff size results in a poor fit. Additionally many people who are obese have arms that ar...

Measurement of Blood Pressure in the Office To the Editor: The algorithm for office blood pressure recently proposed by Myers et al1 does not allow for the discernment of isolated clinic or masked hypertension. In a recent study we measured observed automated blood pressure (nurse present), unobserved automated blood pressure (3 readings at 3-minute intervals after 5 minutes of rest), and ambul...

u NTlL recently, a~ilbulatory blood pressure measurement was largely tlie preserve of physicians working in specialized centres. ?'lie reasons for this included the fact that the first clevices recorded blood pressure invasively arid were associated wit11 so~tic risk ant1 were tl~ercfore of liniitcd clinical application. l'lie early setiii-automated non-invasive devices of the 1960s had to be f...

Measurement of the arterial blood pressure (BP) is a time-honored, vital piece of medical information whose accuracy is seldom questioned. This review identifies the unappreciated weakness of the early validation data that compared the cuff to intra-arterial BP's. Unfortunately, the inaccuracy of the auscultatory systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) measurements are necessarily transmitted to the...

Vital sign measurement and assessment are important components of the review of systems in a physical therapy examination for individuals with and without documented cardiopulmonary disease. The measurement of blood pressure gives the therapist information regarding the patient's baseline cardiovascular status, response to exercise/activity, and guides exercise prescription. Accurate measuremen...

Guidelines for the management of hypertension have started to include home blood pressure (BP) and 24-h ambulatory BP monitoring as preferred methods for diagnosing hypertension. The next step will be to incorporate automated office BP measurement into the algorithm for diagnosing hypertension. Recent studies support this approach with automated office BP readings being closely correlated with ...

'I'liat thc ~)lie~iolnenon of blood spurting from a severed arlery failed to excite the minds of scientists until relatively recently may be seen as an indictment of the development of scientific reasoning (Figure 1). That tlie cliscovery of BP was virtually ignored by the scientific community for alnlost a century is even more remarkable. This essay which opens, therefore, on a critical note w...

Cardiovascular diseases are the main cause of death in Germany. A long-term blood pressure measurement is crucial to identify hypertension which can lead to cardiovascular disease. Conventional techniques use the automatic arm cuff method which is painful and provides only intermittent results. A new method for continuous measurement is developed using a DOPPLER ultrasound sensor on a superfici...