Update on the Diagnosis of High Blood Pressure I: 24-Hour Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring

The recently published NICE guideline takes a step further than national and international recommendations that have already emphasized the potential of ambulatory blood pressure data. NICE recommend confirming the diagnosis of hypertension by means of ambulatory blood pressure recordings. If ambulatory monitoring is impossible, they propose home blood pressure measurements as an alter-native. However, there are certain prerequisites to be taken into consideration when relying on ambulatory and home blood pressure recordings. Part 1 of this publication focuses on ambulatory blood pressure measurement, its methodology, technical background, and the interpretation of results. Main advantages of this tool are its excellent reproducibility and strong correlations of results to target organ damage and prognosis. The paper shows that not only mean values of 24-hour, day-, and nighttime blood pressures can be used in the interpretation of the results. Especially the different periods of the circadian blood pressure profile provide important information for diagnosis and prognosis of hypertension and resulting therapeutic consequences.