Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring for Routine Clinical Practice

Abstract

“The inherent variability of the blood pressure has led to problems in the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of hypertension. Knowing how the blood pressure fluctuates with the stresses and strains of everyday life should help in assessing the severity of hypertension, the response to treatment, and the prognosis in individual cases.” — —Hinman et al; 1962. It has taken 40 years for the ideas first proposed in this quote from an article1 on a new portable device for recording blood pressure (BP) to be considered for routine clinical practice. However, it did not take this long for astute researchers to recognize the importance of the development of this portable BP recorder, later known by the name of its manufacturer, the Remler Company. By 1966, Maurice Sokolow et al had used the semi-automated Remler device to compare casual office BP with readings taken during awake hours in 124 patients with a diagnosis of hypertension.2 Despite the rather primitive technology by today’s standards, Sokolow et al were able to show that the ambulatory BP was a better predictor of hypertensive complications than the casual office BP. Sokolow and …