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Commonly used arm positions can overestimate blood pressure readings: study

(medicalxpress.com)
330 points wglb | 1 comments | 14 Oct 24 17:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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crazygringo ◴[14 Oct 24 19:30 UTC] No.41841006[source]▶
There's definitely a huge variance in blood pressure readings depending on posture, relaxation, arm position, recent activity, etc. If you buy a blood pressure monitor, it's really interesting to see how "random" a single reading at the doctors' is, and how large your fluctuation throughout the day is.

That being said, it really makes me wonder about studies that correlate blood pressure with other things. Is the blood pressure really being measured "correctly" in all those studies? Or not?

In other words, if your "true correct" blood pressure is lower than what the doctor normally takes, but then a lot of the studies are based on real-life "incorrect" higher blood pressures, then don't you similarly want an "incorrect" higher reading for consistency? Or are the studies always really done with far more accurate blood pressure readings, where the patient sits still for 5 min beforehand, keeps their legs uncrossed, is totally free of stress and anxiety, didn't exercise beforehand, etc.?

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Zenzero ◴[15 Oct 24 00:55 UTC] No.41843843[source]▶
> are the studies always really done with far more accurate blood pressure readings, where the patient sits still for 5 min beforehand, keeps their legs uncrossed, is totally free of stress and anxiety, didn't exercise beforehand, etc.?

In situations where blood pressure really matters, we aren't playing around with the cuff and hand positioning. The patient gets an art line.

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1. lazide ◴[15 Oct 24 02:35 UTC] No.41844385[source]▶
Oddly, at least a decade ago, at least one Bay Area hospital stroke protocol required manual BP readings with a sphygmomanometer. And the patient had an art line.

Not sure if they didn’t have the equipment for art blood pressure or what, but good BP readings were important. And they had all the fancy equipment. Patient presented with an ischemic stroke, and was getting a stent + thinners, so anything problematic was likely due to something immediately life threatening.

They didn’t want an automatic cuff system because it could cause something to burst with the pressure ramp up. At least that is what the surgeon said.

Source: I was the EMT-B on his clinicals who stayed with the patient in the OR while he got stented and took readings every 5 minutes because none of the nurses were ‘current’ on the manual cuff. or so they said. I was pretty fresh, and was pretty good at it at the time, but I think they were just making excuses now haha. I held his hand through the procedure to help calm him down too, which seemed to help a lot.

Patient 20 something that day. Emergency Rooms are quite an experience. I volunteered for Halloween Night, which added to it I’m sure.

PS. Watching the Dr install the arterial catheter (or maybe it was a port?) in the ER was wild. Literal stream-of-blood-shooting-across-the-room-and-spraying-on-the-wall wild. Never seen anything like it before or since. I was glad I had my safety glasses on.