Home and ambulatory blood pressure monitoring: when? who?

Blood pressure measurement in the diagnosis and management of hypertension, including the technique required for ambulatory blood pressure monitoring and home blood pressure monitoring, will be reviewed in this article. Home and ambulatory measurements are widely used, both to confirm the diagnosis and to improve adherence to therapy. The major advantage of out-of-office blood pressure monitoring is that it provides a large number of blood pressure measurements away from the medical environment, which represents a more reliable assessment of actual blood pressure than office blood pressure. The advantage of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is its unique ability to measure nocturnal blood pressure. Although not fully validated in large-scale clinical trials, ambulatory blood pressure monitoring appears to correlate best with prognosis. Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring and home blood pressure monitoring provide somewhat different information on the subject's blood pressure status, and the two methods should thus be regarded as complementary, rather than competitive or alternative.