[Continuous blood pressure monitoring over a 24-hour period in children with terminal renal failure treated with hemodialysis].

Recent evidence suggests that circadian blood pressure changes are common in patients with impaired renal function and has excellent correlation with end-organ damage. The aim of this paper was to: 1) evaluate if children with end-stage renal failure have altered circadian blood pressure rhythm; 2) assess whether pre- or postdialytic blood pressure is representative for the average interdialytic blood pressure; 3) assess whether pre- or postdialytic blood pressure is representative for the average interdialytic blood pressure; 3) determine influence of pre-, post and interdialytic blood pressure. Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring was performed in two groups of patients: group A-13 children with end-stage renal failure, aged 15.15 +/- 5.58 years, on chronic haemodialysis from 2 to 156 (mean 45.3) months, 4 of whom were hypertensive and 9 normotensive; group B-19 children with chronic hypertension (essential or renal hypertension) aged 15.28 +/- 2.27 years. 84.62% of children from group A and 31.58% from group B (p = 0.0037) had blunted circadian blood pressure rhythm (a nocturnal reduction of blood pressure is less than 10% of daytime values). Pre- and postdialytic systolic, diastolic and mean arterial blood pressure did not differ significantly and were in correlation with interdialytic blood pressure (r = 0.9; p < 0.01). Pre-, post- and interdialytic blood pressures correlated well with left ventricular mass index (r = 0.6; p < 0.05), but were not in correlation with the degree of hypervolemia (p < 0.05).