Role of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring in hypertensive patients having controlled office blood pressure

Background and objectives: Ambulatory blood pressure (BP) monitoring has become useful in the diag-nosis and management of hypertensive individuals. In this study we tried to know the role of office and ambulatory BP in treated hypertensive patients.Methods and patients: Prospective cohort of 561 treated hypertensive patients were enrolled in the study. Hypertension definitions were according to JNC 8 classification. Office BP and ambulatory BP monitoring was done according to defined protocol.Results: From a subgroup of 158 treated hypertensive patients, 91(16.2%) patients were having white coat hypertension (p value 0.00 by Pearson chi square test). In a subset of 403 patients who were having controlled BP on the day of enrolment as well as on the day of attaching ambulatory BP monitor; 98 (17.4%) patients were having masked uncontrolled hypertension (MUCH). In addition there was very significant percentage of non-dippers and reverse dippers. In our study we found that office BP has a moderate to low specificity and sensitivity and low negative predictive value for overall control in treated hypertensive patients.Conclusion: Ambulatory BP monitoring should be included in the management protocol of treated hy-pertensive patients, for the optimal BP control.(c) 2022 Cardiological Society of India. Published by Elsevier, a division of RELX India, Pvt. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).