Self‐measurement of blood pressure at home: Is it reliable?

Abstract

Self-measurement of blood pressure (BP) at home is more common than 10 years ago and encouraged by current guidelines to increase patient adherence to treatment and reach the goal of target BP. The aims of this study are to evaluate the accuracy of home sphygmomanometers and to investigate behavior/knowledge of the sphygmomanometer owners. A campaign was planned to determine the accuracy of home sphygmomanometers in 2006. Seven hundred and twenty-three home sphygmomanometers were brought by individuals to the University Hospital Hypertension Clinic within 1 year and 693 (96%) of the devices were in adequate working condition and suitable for analysis. Four hundred and thirty-nine (63%) of the sphygmomanometers were automatic. Four hundred and eleven (59.3%) of the 693 sphygmomanometer were inaccurate. About 80% (256/320) of the wrist devices were inaccurate. Most studies evaluating the accuracy of sphygmomanometers are conducted in hospital or primary care settings; studies investigating home sphygmomanometers are rare. High frequency of inaccurate home devices is a major public health problem. In conclusion, inaccurate devices have been used in home BP measurements frequently and frequency of device-related errors can be decreased by awareness and training of the patients. Physicians and healthcare providers should advise the patients to check the accuracy of their home sphygmomanometers regularly.

Accuracy of Sphygmanometers at Pharmacies

“…To our knowledge, the accuracy of sphygmomanometers used at pharmacies has not been studied previously. Inaccuracy of sphygmomanometers is a common problem [24] . The frequency of inaccurate devices shows a wide variation, from 0 to 72% [24,25] .…”

“…Most of the studies investigating inaccuracy of sphygmomanometers were conducted in hospital or primary care settings and a few number of studies investigated home sphygmomanometers [24] . Our study showed that 40 of the 135 (30%) devices were inaccurate.…”

Home sphygmomanometers: validation versus accuracy

“…The participants were informed about the campaign to evaluate the accuracy of BP measurements performed at home by using home sphygmomanometers through television programs, newspapers, patient meetings, brochures, and banners. We published our first findings recently [13]. As we did not collect the data regarding the manufacturer and models of the devices in the first study [13], we were unable to evaluate the validation of the sphygmomanometers.…”

Influence of the recommendations on the implementation of home blood pressure measurement by French general practitioners

“…Briefly, the main questions were as follows: use and frequency of use of HBPM [15]; reasons for use and nonuse [16][17][18]; reliability of HBPM [19][20][21][22]; benefits of HBPM in everyday management of hypertensive patients [23,24]; limitations of HBPM [16,18,25,26]; HBPM contraindications [5]; practical modalities for the provision of devices [16,17]; type of devices and their validation [27]; number of devices owned by the physician [16,17]; HBPM measurement procedures [4,5]; use of written instructions given to the patient (patient education) [28]; and rough assessment or exact computation of the mean BP measurements [16].…”