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(Hypertension. 2002;40:792.)
© 2002 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial Commentaries

Hypertension Staging Through Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring

From the Department of Clinical Medicine, Prevention, and Applied Biotechnologies, University of Milano-Bicocca; and II Cardiology Unit, S. Luca Hospital, IRCCS, Istituto Auxologico Italiano, Milano, Italy.

Correspondence to Dr Gianfranco Parati, Cardiology II, S. Luca Hospital, Via Spagnoletto, 3 Milano–20149, Italy. E-mail gianfranco.parati@unimib.it

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

This issue of Hypertension includes an article by Bur et al¹ that focuses on the comparison between clinic and ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) values in patients with moderate to severe hypertension. The primary goal of the Bur study was to obtain a classification of hypertensive patients, based on the ABP values corresponding to the clinic blood pressure (BP) values that have been used to stage hypertension by the World Health Organization–International Society of Hypertension (WHO-ISH) and the Joint National Committee on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure (JNC) VI guidelines.^2,3 An additional goal was to evaluate whether this ABP-based classification has prognostic value, as shown for the prognostic value of the clinic BP staging. Both clinic BP and ABP were measured in 736 hypertensive patients (557 of whom were under treatment) at the time of their first admission to the local Hypertension Unit. All patients then entered a follow-up period with an average duration of 52 months (range, 6 to 96 months), during which only clinic BP was obtained. During the observation time, 82 patients had nonfatal cardiovascular events and 9 patients died of cardiovascular causes.

The article adds interesting information to the existing database on the clinical value of ABP. In particular, it contributes to the available knowledge on the prognostic importance of ABP as well as on its relation to clinic BP in the context of treating patients in a hypertension center.⁴

Stratifying patients into different risk categories on the basis of ABP values requires studies . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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