Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring - Focus on Childhood

Summary

Conventional office measurements of blood pressure (BP) are limited in their ability to assess long termhemodynamic load on cardiovascular system. The ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) offers theadvantage of providing multiple blood pressure measurements from a subject’s normal environment during his normalactivities, thereby revealing important patterns of blood pressure during the whole 24-hour period. Results of ABPMhave much better correlation with end organ damage than casual BP and provide more sensitive data of ultimateprognosis. There is much better long-term reproducibility of ambulatory blood pressure compared with conventionaloffice BP measurements. The phenomenon of „white coat” hypertension (WCH) defined as mean office BP readingsin the hypertensive range but ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) readings in the normal range represents probablya benign entity not requiring pharmacological treatment. Based on normal population of school children andadolescents the percentiles of ABP have been recently established and patterns of ABP have been studied in childrenin various clinical settings. WCH has been recognized in childhood and its prevalence seems to be higher comparingwith adult population. ABPM seems to be an effective and well tolerated tool in evaluating BP in children andadolescents helping to identify those who need careful checkup and treatment.

Key words:
ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, hypertension, white coat hypertension, childhood.