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Abstract
Evaluation of: Rothwell PM, Howard SC, Dolan E et al. Prognostic significance of visit-to-visit variability, maximum systolic blood pressure, and episodic hypertension. Lancet 375, 895–905 (2010).
Spontaneous fluctuations of blood pressure from visit to visit have usually been disregarded as a trivial factor that confounds the ‘true’ associations of an individual’s long-term average blood pressure with disease. The paper under evaluation shows that visit-to-visit blood pressure variability is an independent predictor of future cardiovascular events in hypertensive patients and in subjects surviving a transient cerebral ischemia. Episodic elevations of blood pressure in nonhypertensive subjects seem to carry similar adverse prognostic significance. There is some evidence that different blood pressure-lowering drug classes may differ in their effects on visit-to-visit blood pressure variability, but these findings need to be confirmed in further studies.
Financial & competing interests disclosure
The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.
No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.
