Hypertension diagnosis and management withABPM

In my opinion high blood pressure can be better managed with Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitor (ABPM) than conventional manual measurement method.

Clinic blood preasure measurements, done manually, which at present are used to diagnose hypertension, are likely to give false positive and false negative results in any patient as there are intra and interobserver variation and other factors.

Manual blood pressure recording has the following difficulties:

>Observer variation – the reading varies when same person checks blood pressure (BP) at different times (intra observer variation). It varies with person to person measuring BP (interobserver variation).

>Phase IV (muffling of sound) or phase`V (disappearance of sound) of Korotkoff sound as distolic pressure. Some use phase IV and some use phase V

>Tendancy to take the rounded up figure, e.g. if it is 138mm we may call it 140mm.

>White coat effect – BP rises initially because of anxiety.

Read about ABPM, advantages, disadvantages, white coat hypertension, cost-effectiveness of ABPM etc http://www.ideaas.eu/ under diseases and conditions titled Ambulatory blood pressure in brief...