Back to the Basics of Blood Pressure

Almost everyone knows that blood pressure is one of the most important measurements in medicine. Every time a patient visits a physician's office or hospital, one of the first measurements taken is their blood pressure. Since blood pressure plays such a vital role in monitoring a person's overall health, I thought I would write about the basics of blood pressure and some of the terminology used in blood pressure measurement.

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10 Factors That Can Affect Blood Pressure Readings

Have you ever visited the doctor's office and discovered your blood pressure was higher than you expected? Most people do not realize their blood pressure is constantly changing minute by minute in response to mood, activity, body position, etc. In fact, simple changes can cause blood pressure to fluctuate between 5 and 40 mmHg. Here is a list of 10 factors that can temporarily cause significant deviations in your blood pressure measurements.

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Online Blood Pressure Measurement Resources

Since our initial blog post '10 steps to Accurate Manual Blood Pressure Measurement', we've had a few readers contact us seeking some more resources related to taking manual blood pressures and hypertension in general. Below are a couple of websites we've found helpful on these topics.

1. An easy to understand demonstration of blood pressure

The European Society of Hypertension (ESH) created a simple guide to everything blood pressure.  The animated menu covers everything from the physiology basics to treatment options.  It’s a great education tool for patients- click the link below to give it a try!

http://www.my-hypertension.org/blood-pressure-simple-guide/index_eng.htm

2. A video tutorial and technique test on blood pressure measurement from the British Hypertension Society (BHS)

The first section of this tutorial is a video of blood pressure measurement.

The remainder of this section allows you to test your accuracy by recording 34 blood pressure values and comparing your results with those obtained by 24 experienced observers. It's a simple and effective way to stay in practice with manual BP measurement

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/medical/bhs/tutorial/tutorial.htm

10 Steps to Accurate Manual Blood Pressure Measurement

Working for a company that develops blood pressure monitoring devices and technologies, I deal with blood pressure on some level every day. We make accurate and reliable blood pressure measurement our business...literally. So, it only makes sense that we should care about accurate blood pressure measurement from a fundamental perspective, which is the inspiration for my first blog post.

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