Expanding the Use of Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring for the Diagnosis and Management of Patients With Hypertension

For patients with hypertension and their physicians whocare for them, assessment of blood pressure (BP) over24 hours with an automated monitor has considerable appeal. When done properly, ambulatory BP recordings yield far more reproducible values over fairly long periods of time compared with the doctor’s office BP.1 Because ambulatory BP monitoring yields multiple readings during all of a patient’s activities, including the sleeping period and time at work, this method gives a more comprehensive representation of the vascular burden of hypertension than a small number of BP readings in the office of a clinician.2,3 In fact, recent analyses of cohorts of patients with both untreated and treated hypertension followed for up to a decade have typically shown that ambulatory BP has better predictive values for future cardiovascular events than clinical measurements of BP.4,5 When the usefulness of ambulatory BP monitoring became recognized early on by hypertension specialists, the focus of