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Home Doppler blood pressure monitoring in infants and children: a pilot study of its feasibility and clinical utility
Archives of Diseases in Childhood, 06/26/2012
Clothier JC et al. – Home Doppler BP monitoring (HDBPM) is acceptable to children and their families, demonstrating its feasibility as an out–of–office measurement technique. The initial results and the reliability of HDBPM need to be explored in larger clinical studies.
Methods- This single-centre study included all consecutive patients referred to a tertiary hypertension clinic who underwent HDBPM over a 12-month period.
- Parents were taught to measure systolic BP using a Doppler instrument.
- HDBPM was successfully performed in 15 children (median (IQR) age 2.2 (0.9–3.7) years).
- All six patients referred for confirmation of newly diagnosed hypertension following sustained elevated clinic BP levels were found to be normotensive.
- Of the nine children referred with ‘treated hypertension’ for monitoring currently elevated clinic BP levels, four had confirmed hypertension and five were normotensive on HDBPM. In all nine ‘treated hypertensive’ patients, medication changes and normotensive BP levels were achieved with on-going home Doppler monitoring. 11/15 (73.3%) subjects successfully performed >1 BP measurement on at least 24 days of the 28-day monitoring period.
- The median (IQR) number of BP measurements performed weekly through week 4 of HDBPM were 22 (13–36), 18 (12–38), 18 (11–36) and 16 (8–32) respectively.