Ambulatory blood pressure: mortality and morbidity.

Our data justify the conclusion that ambulatory blood pressures are useful in combination with office pressures and standard measures of target organ abnormalities in quantifying the severity of the hypertension in the individual patient. Ambulatory pressures are also useful for stratifying risk in predicting short-term prognosis; they may be markers for tracking the severity of disease and height of the pressure, but should not be used to determine long-term outcome independently of information on subsequent blood pressure control and other risk factors.