At Home Monitoring

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Anchor lead: Home monitoring is the best way to see if your blood pressure medicine is working as well as it should, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Blood pressure medicines should be taken at night to maximize their benefit, a recent study known as the Chronotherapy Trial found. Greg Prokopowicz, a blood pressure expert at Johns Hopkins, says one way to make sure your medicine is working as well as it can be is by monitoring your blood pressure at home.

Prokopowicz: We’ve increasingly come to appreciate the benefits of home monitoring anytime you make any change in blood pressure dosing or the type of medication. One of the issues here is that the main blood pressure measurement they’re interested in is sleep blood pressure, and that’s hard to get because even if you have a home machine it’s going to be difficult to get measurements while you’re sleeping. So typically to do that we do what’s called 24 hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, where you wear a monitor day and all night for 24 hours.  :31

Prokopowicz says devices that will enable consumers to monitor their own blood pressure even while sleeping are emerging on the market. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.