Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring in elderly hypertensive patients.

Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) has been shown to provide a reliable estimation of hourly blood pressure values over the 24 hours. Favourable features of this technique are the lack of alerting reaction to automatic blood pressure readings, at variance from what usually occurs when blood pressure is measured in the doctor's office, and the ability of ABPM to provide information on the 24 hour blood pressure profile without interfering with the physiological nocturnal hypotension. Although automatic blood pressure readings obtained in free-moving subjects are not always accurate, ABPM has been shown to represent a useful approach to evaluate the efficacy of antihypertensive drugs, as it allows to compare the 24 hour blood pressure profile obtained before and during treatment. Its feasibility to this aim is emphasized by the reproducibility of 24 hour ambulatory blood pressure profiles, which do not show any placebo effect. ABPM has been also employed to investigate 24 hour blood pressure fluctuations and to monitor the antihypertensive treatment in elderly hypertensives, in whom the evaluation of the actual time-course of the drug-induced blood pressure reduction over the day and night represents a crucial problem.