Self-measured blood pressures at home and during consulting hours: are there any differences?

Home blood pressures are lower than casual blood pressures and this difference is probably due to physician-patient interaction in a clinical stress situation. In order to prove this assumption we compared the casual blood pressures of 127 subjects, measured by a physician and by the subjects themselves in the presence of the physician, with self-measured values obtained at home over a 7-day observation period. The casual pressures were higher than the home pressures (delta = 7.6/3.9 mmHg) regardless of whether they were taken by the physician or by the subjects themselves in the presence of the physician. The subjects' casual readings (132.9 +/- 17.5/87.6 +/- 12 mmHg) were slightly, but significantly, higher than those measured by the physician (131.9 +/- 18.4/86.3 +/- 12.6 mmHg) and both systolic and diastolic self-measured casual values were highly significantly correlated with the physician's readings (r = 0.92 and 0.91, respectively; P less than 0.01).