Health care providers give special importance to the proper measurement of blood pressure (BP) and treatment when BPs are shown to be persistently elevated. The consequences of elevated BP include high BP mediated target organ damage to the kidneys, brain, heart, along with the premature loss of life. Worldwide, elevated BP is a greater risk of living with a disability from target organ damage than alcohol use, elevated glucose, obesity, and high cholesterol.

Medical students attending the American Medical Association convention as Student Delegates in June 2015, were offered a challenge to measure BP correctly. At various years in medical school, one hundred fifty-nine students who indicated they had been trained in BP measurement accepted our challenge. One student performed all 11 steps properly. The median level of correctly undertaken measures in BP measurement overall was 4 out of the possible 11.

In conclusion, the guidelines recommend an out-of-office measurement technique, ABPM is mentioned as the preferred modality about 50% of the time, with the recommendation split to languages such as home BP and ABPM the other half of the time. It seems that ABPM has the preponderance of evidence to promote its utility as a evidence-based, robust, and out-of-office measurement at this time.

Ref: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.120.14650

Author