Recent advances in automated blood pressure measurement.

During the past 15 years, clinical outcome studies have consistently reported that home and 24-hour ambulatory blood pressure recordings provide a significantly better measure of cardiovascular risk than do manual blood pressure readings taken in the office or clinic. The advent of automated sphygmomanometers that record blood pressure with the patient alone in the examining room will be the next major change in our approach to recording blood pressure. These automated devices virtually eliminate the white coat response and their readings correlate significantly better with the ambulatory blood pressure compared with manual office blood pressure readings. The principal finding from recent research into automated blood pressure measurement is that the presence of an observer during the actual reading in itself provokes the white coat response.