Why the study?
Does ambulatory blood pressure monitoring improve the diagnosis of hypertension and prediction of target organ damage compared to standard auscultation in children and adolescents?
Does ambulatory blood pressure monitoring improve the diagnosis of hypertension and prediction of target organ damage compared to standard auscultation in children and adolescents?
Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is superior to standard clinic measurement for diagnosing hypertension and predicting target organ damage in pediatric patients.
Supports ambulatory monitoring over auscultation for pediatric hypertension diagnosis; leaves open need for prospective outcome trials before practice change.
The prevalence of hypertension in children and adolescents is rising in association with the increasing rate of childhood obesity, and it is associated with early target organ damage. Published guidelines on high blood pressure in children and adolescents, focused on the early and accurate diagnosis of hypertension, resulted in improved ability to identify children with hypertension. Although auscultation using a mercury sphygmomanometer remains the method of choice for evaluation of hypertension in children, accumulating evidence suggests that ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is a more accurate method for diagnosis, and it is more closely associated with target organ damage. In addition, ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is a valuable tool in the assessment of white-coat hypertension, and masked hypertension in children and adolescents. Masked hypertension in children and adolescents is associated with a similar risk of target organ damage as in established hypertension.
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Stabouli et al. (2007) studied this question.
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