COMPARISON OF BLOOD PRESSURE MEASUREMENTS ON THE BARE ARM AND THE SLEEVED ARM - WHAT DOES IT COVER?

Abstract

Objective: The question of blood pressure measuring on the bare arm was debated for many years. The updated guidelines recommend measuring on the bare arm, although former studies found no significant differences between measurements taken over a rolled-down or up sleeve compared to the bare arm. We aim to compare blood pressure measurements on the same patients over a bare and a sleeved arm. Design and method: We collected blood pressure measurements of 100 patients visiting the nephrology clinic between January 2019 and December 2022. Measurements were performed with and without sleeves on each arm for each patient (total of 400 arms) and taken simultaneously on both arms (exchanging the bare and the sleeved arm in the second measurement). Since most variables were not normally distributed, we proceeded to a non-parametric Wilcoxon test to compare each patient's measurements on each arm. Results: No statistically significant differences were found between the sleeved and the bare arm measurements, with one exception of systolic blood pressure measured on the left arm (p = 0.041). Although the actual values demonstrated no statistically significant difference, the absolute values of the differences demonstrated clinically significant higher median values on the sleeved arms, both in systolic blood pressure (7 mmHg on the right arm and 8 mmHg on the left arm) and diastolic blood pressure (5.5 mmHg for both arms). As demonstrated by the wide interquartile ranges in table 1 and seen in figure 1 for all variables, the values of all variables had high variance. Conclusions: We found no statistically significant difference in blood pressure measurements between sleeved and bare arms. However, measurement of blood pressure over sleeved arms provided unpredictable results, with up to 40-50 mmHg differences in some individuals. As clinicians, we believe that in order to standardize blood pressure measurements we should measure blood pressure on the bare arms.