ABPM Could Be Exactly What The Patient Needs

The above title is how author Craig Bowron, MD capped off his recent article “Traditional blood-pressure cuffs not that reliable.” As I was reading the article, I was pleased to see how successful the 15-physician clinic in Minneapolis had been with implementing an Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring (ABPM) program to identify, diagnose and manage their hypertensive patients. One physician was quoted as saying “It’s been breathtaking to see how much difference there can be between office blood pressure readings and what we’ve found with ambulatory [ABP] monitoring”. The practice was able to  lower or end treatment on 13% of their patients after ABPM testing revealed that they were being over-treated. Conversely, 18% had their medication added or increased as their ABPM results showed they were under-treated.

Dr. Bowron nicely details a couple key areas where ABPM is designed to provide more specific insight  like white-coat hypertension and overnight dipping. Understanding if either of these issues are present can be crucial to appropriately treating a patient’s hypertension and is why SunTech Medical has auto-interpretation features in our ABPM reporting software to automatically identify white-coat syndrome and whether or not a patient is a “dipper.” 

In short, the article is a quick but informative read on why it pays to use Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring and you can read it in full by clicking here.