What is Ambulatory Blood Pressure?
Usually, the blood pressure measurement you have on file is one that you have had taken either recently or in the past during a doctor’s office visit, but it does not necesarrily give a good indication as to what your blood pressure is normally. After all, a person’s blood pressure changes all the time. Simply by switching to another activitiy, your blood presure may go up or down, depending also on your own position and whether or not the activity is strenuous or not. Even the very common act of eating is enough to raise your blood pressure, as more blood is needed to be directed to the stomach in order to digest food. This is why a procedure known as ambulatory blood pressure is put into effect.
Ambulatory blood pressure takes a person’s blood pressure on a regular basis at certain intervals. In this way, medical officials can monitor how a person’s blood pressure changes throughout a period of time, which makes it easier to gauge the person’s average blood pressure. This means that the blood pressure reading taken by doctors will not be on the low or high end of the specturm, since multiple readings are processed together to get an average reading.
Ambulatory blood pressure is also a great way to get rid of the white coat hypertension effect that plagues medical files all the time. White coat hypertension is the raised blood pressure one gets via anxiety from being in a hospial setting. Ambulatory blood pressure is taken regularly and usually when a person is sleeping, which means the white coat hypertenstion effect will not come into play except in the rarest of instances. Thus, ambulatory blood pressure is an excellent way for doctors to get a precise and correct reading off patients who desperately need to get their blood pressure checked due to a specific illness or other problems.
Because ambulatory blood pressure is usually checked throughout the night, the phenomenon known as nocturnal hypertension comes into play. Nocturnal hypertension, the elevation of blood pressure at night, is an indication that there is organ damage in a person, so it is imperative that doctors who believe an organ is damaged to run this test, among others, in order to help prove that it is, indeed, the case. Ambulatory blood pressure can help doctors regulate your health, so consider measuring it if you want a better picture of your body’s condition.
