title: Too much of a good thing? A critique of overemphasis on the use of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring in clinical practice.
abstract: Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) can be considered a major achievement in clinical medicine. However, its superiority over traditional clinical measurement has often been overemphasized in the literature. In both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, ABPM has been compared with clinical blood pressure calculated from only a few readings taken over a short period of time. For reasons of costs and practicality, ABPM should not be considered as a routine test in the assessment of the hypertensive patient. Most patients with borderline hypertension or isolated clinical hypertension can be profitably assessed with multiple clinical readings and self-blood pressure monitoring. Patients with large short-term or long-term blood pressure oscillations appear as optimal candidates to ABPM. The many methodological problems associated with the use of this technique suggest that ABPM is performed only by experienced doctors.
mesh_terms: D018660:Blood Pressure Monitoring, Ambulatory / Q000009:adverse effects / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D006973:Hypertension / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000628:therapy; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D012307:Risk Factors