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Ambulatory blood pressure is arterial blood pressure measured in real-life settings by an automatic device.
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Blood pressure (BP) was first measured in the eighteenth century by Halles following Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood. It has been measured in the clinic and operating theater since the early part of the twentieth century and its utility as a predictor of cardiovascular disease established in the second half of the century. The ambulatory measurement of BP (ABPM) outside the clinic or laboratory is a development of the later part of the century. Despite its comparatively recent origin, it is now regarded as the measure of choice clinically since it provides a more reliable and valid measure of an individual’s BP and is a better predictor of later disease, perhaps because it reduces “white coat” hypertension, the elevation of BP produced in some individuals when BP is measured in a medical setting. The...
References and Further Readings
Penaz, J. (1973). Photoelectric measurement of blood pressure volume and flow in the finger. In Digest of the international conference on medicine and biological engineering (pp. 104–104). Dresden.
Steptoe, A. (2001). Ambulatory monitoring of blood pressure in daily life: A tool for investigating psychosocial processes. In J. Fahrenberg & M. Myrtek (Eds.), Progress in ambulatory monitoring (pp. 257–269). Seattle: Hogrefe & Huber.
White, W. B. (2007). Blood pressure monitoring in cardiovascular medicine and therapeutics. Totowa: Humana Press.
Zanstra, Y. J., & Johnston, D. W. (2011). Cardiovascular reactivity in real life settings: Measurement, mechanism and meaning. Biological Psychology, 86, 98–105.
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Johnston, D., Zanstra, Y. (2017). Ambulatory Blood Pressure. In: Gellman, M., Turner, J. (eds) Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6439-6_437-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6439-6_437-2
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