Information about 24 hour BP monitoring for patients

Blood pressure means the pressure of circulating blood against the walls of blood vessels. Elderly and overweight people are more likely to be treated for high blood pressure. Unhealthy lifestyle conditions, including consuming too much salt, smoking, alcohol or not enough exercise contribute to being treated with hypertension as well.

The effects of the factors which raise the risk of hypertension can be succesfully controlled by ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring enables you to extend the monitoring session to several days contrary to the standard BP monitoring techniques. It is important to know that blood pressure levels are not steady during a day, because blood pressure is higher in the morning, changes daytime depending on physically active and passive periods or stress, and it is lower at night.

Ambulatory blood pressure measurement periods

Therefore, during an ambulatory blood pressure monitoring session, it is possible to preset different intervals for morning, day or night periods. Blood pressure has two important elements, they are systolic and diastolic blood pressure. The latter describes the minimum, while the former the maximum pressure in the arteries. At the end of recordings during (home or ambulatory) blood pressure monitoring, systolic pressure is displayed at first, then comes diastolic pressure.

Usually the patient's heart rate is displayed as well, which is between 60-70 beats per minutes without any physical activity. If the device displays 120/80 mmHg, you say that your blood pressure is 120 over 80 millimeters of mercury, which is considered to be normal for adults.

When blood pressure reaches 140/90 mmHg or even exceeds this limit, it is considered to be high, which means hypertension in medical terms. In case of high blood pressure, your heart works harder which results in the rise of the pressure in the arteries. Uncontrolled high blood pressure may lead to heart failure, coronary heart disease, stroke or kidney problems. Therefore ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is necessary to control these significant factors related to heart disease.