Self-blood pressure monitoring as a tool to increase hypertension awareness, adherence to antihypertensive therapy, and blood pressure control

Abstract

For many years, casual blood pressure (BP) taken by a sphygmomanometer in the clinic or at the physician's office has been used as the standard method for diagnosing hypertension. Even if such measurement has been the cornerstone on which our understanding of the consequences of hypertension is based, there is a huge and very consistent body of evidence indicating that casual measurements of BP may provide a very unreliable index for the evaluation of hypertension because of their variability. The two alternative ways of measuring BP that have been most commonly used are measurements made at home by the patient himself (home or self‐BP monitoring—SBPM) and measurements by ambulatory blood pressure recorders. Results obtained by these methods have given closer correlation with a variety of measures of hypertensive end‐organ complications than casual or office BP. Furthermore, the prognostic studies indicate that BP measurements performed in “out‐of‐office” settings (using both home and ambulatory monitoring) are superior to office BP in predicting cardiovascular morbidity and mortality.