Blood pressure: At Home vs at the Doctor's Office

[Spiral]

I read an interesting article I found at Hypertension magazine.

Comparison of Automated Office Blood Pressure With Office and Out-Off-Office Measurement Techniques

Here's what I find interesting. In Europe and the United States, there is a lag behind the Canadian practice.

Despite having emerged as a valuable tool to assess the patient’s BP status, the lack of strong evidence to establish a threshold value for hypertension diagnosis limits the use of AOBP in clinical practice and only the hypertension Canadian guideline13 currently recommends AOBP as the preferred method to measure office BP.

[ch47gunnergirl]

I think at-home monitoring might still be getting a bad rap. Early devices were often not accurate, but I think the tech has finally become so standard that even cheap models may be fairly reliable. I haven't taken mine in to my doc to test against them, but I've checked my machine against a Higi machine and was pretty identical. My mom took their BP machine into the doc, the nurses tested it against their finding and it was accurate. Neither were top-of-the-line machines. Once my mom had her machine tested by her doc's nurses, my dad's BP medicine was based off of readings taken from the home version over a month's time and reported to the doc.