[Evaluation of hypertensive patients by radial arterial diameter variation recording]

A blood less analysis technique of the diameter variation signal at radial artery was used to evaluate the arterial disease and the cardiovascular risk in hypertensive patients. A movement transducer was used to record the wrist pulse. A radial augmentation index was proposed to quantify the magnitude of the pressure wave reflections in the aortic region. The experiment was carried out with a group of 47 hypertensive men and compared with a similar study performed on 81 normotensive healthy men. The last ones presented smaller values of this index, but as age progresses, values of both groups come closer among them. This was confirmed by morphological comparison of both groups. Similar behavior was found in signals coming from healthy normotensive and hypertensive old men with similar age. Furthermore, some of the hypertensive youth presented similar morphological characteristics to normotensive of the same age. That indicates they still conserved the elastic behavior characteristic of its age group. These results, using available technology of smaller cost, were well-matched to those achieved by pressure signals at radial artery obtained by means of applanation tonometry.