Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring and Home Blood Pressure Monitoring
The diagnosis and treatment of hypertension is primarily based on blood pressure measure obtained in the clinic setting. However, there is extensive evidence that out-of-clinic blood pressure can differ substantially from clinic blood pressure. Out-of-clinic blood pressure has been deemed the "true" blood pressure as it represents the blood pressure that a person experiences in the naturalistic environment. There is increasing evidence that out-of-clinic blood pressure is more strongly associated with cardiovascular disease events and mortality compared to clinic blood pressure.
There are two well-validated methods for out-of-clinic blood pressure measurement: ambulatory blood pressure monitoring and home blood pressure monitoring. Therefore, there has been substantial interest in the use of ambulatory and home blood pressure monitoring to determine average out-of-clinic blood pressure as well as other clinically prognostic blood pressure phenotypes (sustained hypertension, masked hypertension, etc.) in individuals taking and not taking antihypertensive medication.
