The international database of self-recorded blood pressures in normotensive and untreated hypertensive subjects

To pool data from individual subjects in an attempt to determine an operational threshold for making clinical decisions based on the self-recorded blood pressure (SRBP) and to examine how many hypertensive subjects, diagnosed by conventional blood pressure (CBP) measurement, would have a self-recorded blood pressure within the normotensive range if the proposed thresholds were applied. Thirteen research groups studied 4668 untreated subjects. In total 2401 subjects were normotensive, 494 were borderline hypertensive and 1773 were definitely hypertensive. Hypertension had been diagnosed from the mean of 1-6 (median 3) CBP measurements obtained during 1-3 (median 1) visits. The reference values for SRBP measurements determined from the 95th percentiles of the distributions for normotensive subjects were 137 mmHg systolic and 85 mmHg diastolic. Of the subjects with systolic hypertension, 16% had systolic SRBP