Nocturnal home blood pressure (BP) monitoring has been used in clinical practice for ~20 years. The authors recently showed that nocturnal systolic BP (SBP) measured by a home BP monitoring (HBPM) device in a Japanese general practice population was a significant predictor of incident cardiovascular disease (CVD) events, independent of office and morning home SBP levels, and that masked nocturnal hypertension obtained by HBPM (defined as nocturnal home BP ≥ 120/70 mmHg and average morning and evening BP < 135/85 mmHg) was associated with an increased risk of CVD events compared with controlled BP (nocturnal home BP < 120/70 mmHg and This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.