[Long-term registration of arterial blood pressure in sleep with noninvasive methods]

Sleep related breathing disorders and essential hypertension are highly interrelated. Many different studies proved a casual relationship between the two disorders (1,2). In a clinical sleep laboratory diagnostics of hypertension has to be non-invasive. There are two completely different methodologies to record blood pressure noninvasively. Continuous methods using fingerphotoplethysmography can record apnea related cyclical variations of blood pressure beat to beat. Unfortunately the absolute value of the pressure readings is sensitive to the position of the finger sensor. Noncontinuous methods using arm cuff inflation preserve appropriate blood pressure values but these are only spot measures during the night. To make use of these it is necessary to record other sleep and respiration related signals in parallel. Both methods were applied in our sleep laboratory and results are presented.