A survey of recent reports on ambulatory blood pressure monitoring

This article is a review of 25 publications on ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) and the importance of its results in everyday clinical practice. These studies, published in 2008-2011, were selected from the Scopus database, but are also available in Pubmed. They were prepared by researchers from around the world, concerned with the problems of proper control of blood pressure (BP), and of abnormalities in the circadian pattern of BP in patients with arterial hypertension, diabetes mellitus or renal failure. In the first part of this article, I analyse publications focused on some nuances in the methodology of ABPM and recommend ways to avoid some traps, related not only to the individual patient but also to the device used and the technical staff. The next section is devoted to the advantages of ABPM as a diagnostic tool which enables clinicians to learn about patients’ BP during sleep, and emphasizes the practical implications of this information for so-called chronotherapy. This section also presents some new studies on the prognostic value of ABPM in patients with cardiovascular (CV) risk. Some recent articles on the results of various methods of pharmacological treatment of arterial hypertension in different age groups are then described. The observations presented in this article may be helpful not only for researchers interested in the chronobiology of the CV system, but also for general practitioners using ABPM.