Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring

In their textbook, Hypertension in practice.)Beevers and MacGregor state: 'The height of the blood pressure is such an accurate predictor of a person's future morbidity and mortality that its measurement is far and away the most important observation made in clinical practice'.Even if this view may be considered by some to be an overstatement, it is certainly true that a raised blood pressure is a very important predictor of cardiovascular disease.The reason for target-organ damage in hypertension is believed to be the strain put on these organs by a consistently elevated blood pressure.Among types of hypertensive cardiovascular damage the most well known are left ventricular hypertrophy, kidney disease, aortic aneurysm, cerebral haemorrhage and atherosclerosis, which may result in cerebral and myocardial infarction as well as other vascular complications.Since we know that blood pressure varies considerably from time to time depending on, for example, physical or emotional stress, it is surprising that single or repeated casual blood pressure measurements, although far from perfect, can still be a valuable predictor of cardiovascular complications as suggested above.It would seem reasonable to assume, however, that a measure of the total pressure load during one or more days and nights might be an even more accurate indicator for cardiovascular mortality.During the last few decades, rapid technical development has created the possibility to