[Study of blood pressure variability in arterial hypertension and relation with glomerular filtration]

Besides reducing blood pressure, it is important to think about the blood pressure variability that hypertensive patients may present. Indeed, studies suggest that target organ damage is greater in hypertensive people with high blood pressure variability. The purpose of the present study was to determine the blood pressure variability in patients who had not been treated with antihypertensive medication, as well as its relationship with the glomerular filtration.

We included 702 patients with clinical indication for 24h ambulatory blood pressure monitoring.

43.6% of patients had high variability of the blood pressure. These patients had greater levels of 24-h systolic blood pressure, diurnal and night blood pressure and a lower glomerular filtration. The main factors associated with high blood pressure variability were age, years from diagnosis of arterial hypertension, systolic blood pressure and a glomerular filtration smaller than 60ml/min.

A high variability of blood pressure is frequent among hypertensive patients. Since it is not possible to perform ambulatory blood pressure measurement in all them, we should mainly suspect it in old patients and in those with reduced glomerular filtration.