Automated BP vs Manual BP Measurement: Which is Better? (Part 2 of 2)

In my last post, I discussed the importance of informed debate in helping determine effective clinical practice. Specifically, I mentioned two recent journal articles about automated oscillometric blood pressure devices that arrived at two different conclusions. In that post I also provided some comments from the SunTech perspective. Today, I’ll share the perspectives of an experienced, practicing physician on the subject of automated BP devices versus manual sphygmomanometers.

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Automated BP vs Manual BP Measurement: Which is Better? (Part 1 of 2)

What’s a clinician to do? Debates about clinical trials, patient populations, and statistical analyses can seem hollow and distant when looking at an anxious patient in an exam room. At that moment, all that matters is what’s best for your patient. Yet clinically relevant data, and more importantly, rigorous discussion of that data, is the means to the end. Professional clinicians quite often need the former in order to effectively deliver the latter. To wit, two similar journal articles were recently published that arrived at two very different conclusions. Let’s take a look:

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Correctly Diagnosing High BP in Children: Help Needed!

We recently came across a video report that originally appeared shortly after an article on the underdiagnosis of hypertension in children and adolescents was published in the August 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The focal point of the report was the fact that 3 out of every 4 children who have high blood pressure have not been correctly diagnosed with the condition. This certainly would prompt the question “Why not?”

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Top 5 reasons your automated BP monitor gave an error code

“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”  ~B.F. Skinner, Contingencies of Reinforcement, 1969

Sometimes, the more technology aims to help us, the more burden we take on to ensure it works. These days, automated blood pressure monitors are rapidly displacing mercury and aneroid sphygmomanometers in physician’s offices. As we move farther away from the 100 year old standard of listening for Korotkoff sounds to obtain a BP measurement, and towards the simple press of a button, there are a new set of usage factors that clinicians must remember when encountering problems.

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Canadian Blood Pressure Study of Obese Children Yields Unexpected Results

A recent Canadian blood pressure study discovered that high blood pressure does not directly correlate with the rising obesity rate in pediatric patient populations.  Contrary to expected research outcomes, while most pediatric patients (ages 6-19) with high blood pressure were obese, not all overweight adolescents (a mere 3%) suffer from high blood pressure.

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Guidelines for Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring in Children

Having covered the recently rising awareness of childhood hypertension, we thought it appropriate to highlight the guidelines of using ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) in children.  The American Heart Association has published comprehensive recommendations on this topic...

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Instrument Calibration Adds Error Potential in Manual BP Measurement

In previous posts, we have reviewed the 10 Steps to Accurate Manual Blood Pressure Measurement and 10 Factors That Can Affect Blood Pressure Readings.  As important as these details are, accurate measurement also requires two things:

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Blood Pressure Monitoring and Infection Control

Infection control has long been a hot topic for acute-care hospitals, and has been the focus of patient advocacy groups, the popular press, and legislators for some time. Old stories of sponges and instruments being left inside patients by harried doctors and nurses have been supplanted by nightmarish scenarios containing ominous-sounding names like Clostridium difficile and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Unfortunately, for many patients in today's healthcare system, hypothetical scenarios and clinical studies have become a real matter of life and death. As a result, the spotlight is expanding to include other areas of the healthcare continuum-including long-term care facilities.

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Blood Pressure in your Medical Practice

Thanks to the increasing concern regarding cardiovascular disease, blood pressure (BP) is one of the more well-known vital signs. Just about everyone has had their BP measured in a clinic. In the last few years, many track their own BP with the widespread availability and affordability of home monitors. Although experts in cardiology regard ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) as the gold standard, it is not as frequently used in regular medical practice as in-office or home BP. Each method has its benefits and disadvantages.

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Physician Acquired Blood Pressure Measurement is Higher than Nurse Acquired BP

There are several different types of mild and/or episodic hypertension that ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) can help a physician diagnose. However, the summary data that ABPM provides, the average daytime or 24-hour blood pressure as two examples, provides significantly different information than the one or two measurements taken in a clinic. Although this difference is one of the reasons that ABPM correlates better to cardiovascular outcomes than in-clinic BP, making it the gold standard for BP measurement, there are few detailed guidelines on the targets or thresholds for ABP like there are for in-clinic BPs like the popular 120/80 as a threshold for normal BP and 140/90 for hypertensive.*

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