Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring Is Useful for Evaluating Hypertensive Children

Pediatricians routinely obtain blood pressure (BP) measurements in healthy children and aggressively evaluate hypertensive patients. Currently, pediatricians have few tools to identify children who require extensive and invasive testing for secondary etiologies of hypertension. In this study, researchers evaluated the utility of ambulatory BP monitoring (ABPM) -- a method of obtaining frequent BP measures over a 24-hour period -- for differentiating between secondary and primary (essential) hypertension in children. Hypertension was defined as sustained BP elevation above the 95^th percentile for age, gender, and height.

Researchers obtained ABPM data on 85 children (97 studies in 32 untreated and 53 treated children) who were under evaluatio…