Cost considerations of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring

Automatic blood pressure monitoring has proved valuable in testing new antihypertensive drugs, providing greater precision at less cost. Results obtained by this method are better correlated with target-organ damage (e.g. left ventricular hypertrophy) than conventional office blood pressure measurements. A number of clinical conditions are better evaluated with ambulatory blood pressure monitoring than with conventional measurements, e.g. office (white coat) hypertension, episodic hypertension and intermittent hypertensive symptoms. An economic model suggests that appropriately constrained ambulatory blood pressure monitoring can be highly cost-effective in patients who are initially diagnosed as mildly hypertensive on the basis of repeated casual blood pressure measurements. Normative data are needed for populations by age, race, gender, body habitus and conditions such as pregnancy.