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...

Achieving target levels of office and/or ambulatory blood pressure readings among treated hypertensive patients is an important aspect of cardiovascular disease prevention. Although office blood pressure measurement is simple and convenient, ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is especially useful for identifying patients with 'white coat' hypertension, in whom falsely raised office blood pres...

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....

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...

Blood pressure measurement in the diagnosis and management of hypertension, including the technique required for ambulatory blood pressure monitoring and home blood pressure monitoring, will be reviewed in this article. Home and ambulatory measurements are widely used, both to confirm the diagnosis and to improve adherence to therapy. The major advantage of out-of-office blood pressure monitori...

OBJECTIVES Increased arterial stiffness is associated with the development of cardiovascular disease and may even predict its development at an early stage. Increased pulse pressure is seen as a marker of increased arterial stiffness and can be readily measured by ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. We propose another surrogate measure of arterial stiffness derived from ambulatory blood press...

BACKGROUND Patients with elevated clinic blood pressure and normal ambulatory blood pressure have a better prognosis than patients with sustained ambulatory hypertension, and may not have to be treated with antihypertensive drugs. On the contrary, current guidelines emphasize repeated clinic blood pressure measurements for the initiation of antihypertensive therapy. OBJECTIVE To examine the r...

The purpose of this study was to determine if ambulatory blood pressure measurement predicted total and cardiovascular mortality over and beyond clinic blood pressure measurement and other cardiovascular risk factors; 5292 untreated hypertensive patients referred to a single blood pressure clinic who had clinic and ambulatory blood pressure measurement at baseline were followed up in a prospect...

BACKGROUND There is evidence that in cirrhotic patients, certain hemodynamic parameters, such as blood pressure and heart rate, are related to the severity of liver disease. This study investigated whether non-invasive 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure and heart rate are more closely associated with markers of liver disease severity than conventional office measurements. METHODS Ambulatory pa...