Ambulatory blood pressure

Ambulatory blood pressure, as opposed to office blood pressure, is the blood pressure over the course of the full 24-hour sleep-wake cycle. Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) measures blood pressure at regular intervals throughout the day and night. It avoids the white coat hypertension effect in which a patient's blood pressure is elevated during the examination process due to nervousness and anxiety caused by being in a clinical setting. ABPM can also detect the reverse condition, masked hypertension, where the patient has normal blood pressure during the examination but uncontrolled blood pressure outside the clinical setting, masking a high 24-hour average blood pressure. Out-of-office measurements are highly recommended as an adjunct to office measurements by almost all hypertension organizations.