Clinical Significance of Blood Pressure Levels during Treadmill Exercise Testing

Treadmill exercise testing is the most common noninvasive test to assess patients with suspected or known cardiovascular disease. Measurement of blood pressure (BP) during exercise stress is cumbersome due to patient motion and hemodynamic changes during exercise. Different population studies give differing levels for abnormal BP response to exercise and there is no unanimity about the level of BP at which exercise test is contraindicated or terminated. However, studies uniformly associate abnormal BP responses to exercise not only with risk of future hypertension but also with cardiovascular events, stroke and mortality. The present article provides a brief account of common precautions in BP measurement, the diagnostic and prognostic significance of different BP responses during exercise stress testing.