Blood Pressure Variability: A Novel and Important Risk Factor

Blood pressure is a continuous, not a static, variable. Individuals exhibiting similar clinic or home blood pressure can differ considerably with respect to their average day and nighttime values, beat-by-beat blood pressure variation during wakefulness and sleep, responses to mental and physical stimuli, and intersession and seasonal variation. There now is evidence that several such representations of blood pressure variability, if augmented, increase cardiovascular risk independent of the average of conventionally acquired blood pressure readings. As well, recent retrospective analyses of published trial data have concluded that antihypertensive drug classes differ in their effects on intersession blood pressure variability and associated risk of stroke. If the goal of the hypertension community is to optimize personalized cardiovascular risk assessment and to attenuate fully such risk, future efforts should be directed at determining which representation of blood pressure variability estimates individual cardiovascular risk best, establishing "normal" and "high-risk" variability distributions, testing the hypothesis that attenuating such variability specifically through drug or device therapy reduces cardiovascular risk more than blood pressure reduction per se, and integrating such data into clinical practice.