Endocrine Abstracts

Objectives: To check possible advantages of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) in diagnosis and disease control respect to blood pressure conventional measurement ways.

Also to study the circadian rhythm of each patient to detect higher cardiovascular risk situations.

Material and methods: One hundred and nine patients were included in this study: 44% male, 56% female. ABPM were indicated in four different situations: hypertension diagnosis (45%), treatment efficacy (44%), pheocromocytoma (2.8%), miscelanous (8.2%).

Daytime blood pressure values and the night decrease were studied to catalog them as deeper, non-deeper or raiser. ABPM values and consulting ones were compared. Finally, we compared non-deeper/raiser frequency between treated patients and people who acceded for diagnosis.

Results: In the hypertension screening group, 17 of 49 were confirmed, from them 25 (51.03%) were deeper and 24 (48.97%) were non-deeper/raiser.

In the treatment efficacy group, 23 of 43 were wrongly controlled. Nine were deeper (15%) and 36 were non-deeper/raiser (75%).

Blood pressure values to consider hypertension were over 135/85 during the day and over 120/70 during night. We considered deeper if blood pressure decreased more then 10%. Non-deeper if these values decreased less tan this value and raiser if there was an increasement of blood pressure.

Forty of the 109 patients included in the study took benefits by initializing or modifying their current treatment.

Conclusions: ABPM was useful to:

1. Diagnose hypertension when this is not possible by common ways.

2. Evaluate antihypertensive treatment efficacy and, if necessary, make changes in this treatment.

3. Identify ‘non-deeper and raiser’ patients, to value possible treatment that could improve cardiovascular risk.