Ambulatory Blood Pressure and Mortality

To the Editor: Banegas et al. (April 19 issue) 1 claim to have found that ambulatory blood pressure is a better predictor of mortality than blood pressure measured in the clinic (clinic blood pressure). However, this study does not really address the critical question of how much better. My colleagues and I conducted a study that was based on population surveys and that used clinic and ambulatory blood-pressure data from 7927 persons. 2 The results of our analyses were similar to those of the study conducted by Banegas et al.; we found a significant change in the area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve . . .