Blood pressure in the neonate

The paper by Dannevig et al. in this issue of Acta Paediatrica carefully compares the agreement between blood pressure measurements made by three non-invasive blood pressure monitors with those made from an indwelling intra-arterial catheter. Non-invasive blood pressure monitoring is not particularly accurate for making measurements in neonates and generally overestimates the blood pressure as observed by others. Clinicians thus should be wary about using non-invasive blood pressure techniques as substitutes for monitoring by means of an intra-arterial catheter and transducer.