If you want to know whether the treatments you’re using for high blood pressure are working, taking a single measurement of your blood pressure may not accurately answer your question.
That’s the main finding from a study reported in June in the Annals of Internal Medicine. In the study, researchers followed 444 veterans with high blood pressure – mostly men - for 18 months. The participants underwent three types of blood-pressure measurements during this period: checkups in a research setting; while making visits to a clinic; and with a monitor at home that sent in the results electronically.
Over these 18 months, the participants provided more than 110,000 measurements of their systolic blood pressure (the first number in a reading).
At the beginning of the study, the three approaches led to substantially different takes on whether the participants had their blood pressure under control. The percentage deemed under control ranged from 28 to 68 percent, depending on the method.
Regardless of the type of measurement, individuals’ blood pressure values varied quite a bit from checkup to checkup. And in many cases, a single measurement in the clinic couldn’t establish to a certain enough degree whether someone’s blood pressure was controlled or not. As a result, the researchers wrote that using a single blood pressure measurement from a doctor’s visit could misclassify many patients with high blood pressure.
Instead, doctors should use the average of several measurements if they want to be confident that they’re correctly identifying whether patients have their hypertension under control.
As the lead researcher told a health news outlet, some people have “white coat hypertension,” or blood pressure that comes up high when they’re in a health-care setting. Prescribing or adjusting blood pressure medication using just one reading could be harmful for these patients. These results also suggest that people with hypertension can benefit from monitoring their blood pressure at home.
If you decide to measure your blood pressure at home, be sure to check the device at the doctor’s office to ensure that it’s accurate. And ask your doctor – or other health care provider – how often you should measure yourself and how you should share this information with the provider.
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