Recent evidence indicates that both ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) and home blood pressure monitoring (HBPM) are more useful than the measurement of office blood pressure for evaluating cardiovascular risks in subjects with hypertension. The major advantage of ABPM over HBPM is the ability to measure nighttime blood pressure and ambulatory blood pressure during the day. A newly developed, programmable HBPM device (HEM-5041, OMRON, Kyoto, Japan) can record blood pressure up to 350 times and measure nighttime blood pressure automatically.
To validate the utility, feasibility, and safety of this device, we measured blood pressure by HBPM using HEM-5041 and by ABPM and compared the values in healthy volunteers.
As compared with ABPM, daytime blood pressures, coefficients of variation for systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and pulse rate, and the percentage nighttime fall in these variables were significantly lower with HBPM. However, nighttime blood pressures did not significantly differ between HBPM and ABPM. The results of a questionnaire survey indicated that the subjects were more comfortable when blood pressure was measured by HBPM than by ABPM, whereas the quality of sleep was similar.
Our results suggest that HEM-5041 is useful for evaluating nighttime blood pressures as well as nighttime blood pressure falls, without causing clinically significant discomfort.