We recognise that isolated blood pressure recordings are entirely useless. They can not be used to make a diagnosis. They can not be used to predict prognosis and they can not be used to monitor a patient’s response to treatment. They are a waste of time.

The best way to get a good understanding of blood pressure is to use something called ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. Here a blood pressure machine is strapped to the patient for 24 hours and the machine will automatically measure the blood pressure twice every hour during waking hours and once every hour at night and then calculate 3 sets of average from all the readings. It will give you a 24 hour average, a daytime average and a night time average. All research studies on the subject of blood pressure have found that ambulatory blood pressure monitoring is the most reliable noninvasive method for an accurate assessment of blood pressure. The results are reproducible because all the variability tends to get averaged out. An ambulatory blood pressure monitor can be helpful to give you an accurate representation of blood pressure numbers, it is more accurate in terms of predicting prognosis and it can reliably assess response to treatment.