The Use of Short-Term Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring in Differing Forms of Hypertension

Single blood pressure readings represent the conventional approach for determining the presence and severity of hypertension. However, the relationship between single (casual) readings and the whole-day blood pressure average is weak, especially in patients with borderline hypertension and in the elderly. In this study we have compared casual blood pressures with the averages of blood pressures obtained during short-term (two-hour) and long-term (24-hour) ambulatory monitoring in patients with mild (n=19), moderate (n=11), or predominant systolic (n=11) essential hypertension. The blood pressure averages obtained during long-term monitoring were significantly lower than the casual blood pressure in all three subgroups. The averages of short-term monitoring in the morning were in between the other two blood pressure levels. The correlation coefficients between two-hour morning averages of pressure and whole-day averages were highly significant (p