[New aspects in evaluating the hypertensive patient: measuring blood pressure in the physician's office--ambulatory blood pressure monitoring--blood pressure self-measurement].

The "average" blood pressure of hypertensives, which is held responsible for the adverse effects of hypertension is poorly reflected by causal readings (CR), which are taken as a surrogate. CR do not only differ from average blood pressures, but also fail to give information on blood pressure variability. According to white coat effect and blood pressure variability a satisfying classification of severity and consecutively of prognosis cannot be done in an individual. Furthermore CR fail to inform us sufficiently about therapeutic effects in single patients. To improve we have to change to blood pressure judgements which are based on many instead of occasional readings. Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABM) is a possibility to overcome this weakness. Compared to casual readings the average of the ambulatory readings is higher reproducible and does not depend on placebo treatment. In spite of this advantage a general substitution of CR by ABM is impossible because the number of equipment available is too small, nobody wants to cover the costs, the procedure is inconvenient, and up till now we miss guidelines how to proceed in the daily routine. Blood pressure self-monitoring is an additional way to improve the weakness of CR. The amount of blood pressure readings needed for a satisfying judgement of blood pressure are taken and registered by the patients. The self recorded data can be used as a valuable data base to calculate average blood pressure and blood pressure variability and drug effects. Mean values of twice daily recordings of a month are highly reproducible and do highly correlate to average ABM recordings of the day.