Predictive validity of automated oscillometric blood pressure monitors for screening atrial fibrillation: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: This study was conducted to verify if automated oscillometric blood pressure monitors (AOBPMs) have sufficiently high predictive validity to screen patients with atrial fibrillation (AF).Methods: Electronic searches were performed to identify all studies published between 1946 and 14 July 2018, from indexed in Ovid-Medline, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and CINAHL by using the following keywords: ‘atrial fibrillation,’ ‘atrial flutter,’ ‘blood pressure monitor,’ and ‘sphygmomanometer.’Results: Thirteen diagnostic accuracy studies, including a total of 9,380 elderly, were included in our meta-analysis. The meta-analysis showed that the pooled sensitivity was 0.91 (95% CI, 0.89 to 0.93), and the heterogeneity between studies was as high as 88.4% (X2 = 120.55, p < 0.001). The pooled specificity was 0.96 (95% CI, 0.96 to 0.97), and the heterogeneity between studies was 95.3% (X2 = 299.26, p < .001). The area under the curve (AUC) of the summary receiver operating characteristic (sROC) curve was 0.98 (SE = 0.005), and the Q-value was 0.94 (SE = 0.010).Conclusion: The AOBPM is an appropriate screening tool that may be applied to elderly to verify the presence of AF conveniently. The AOBPM has high applicability in practice, since it may prevent potentially fatal complications such as stroke.