Value of home blood pressure as predictor of target organ damage in mild arterial hypertension

Relationships between 24 h blood pressure load and target organ damage in patients with mild-to-moderate essential hypertension.

Objective: To analyse the relationships between 24 h blood pressure load (the percentage of systolic/diastolic blood pressures exceeding 140/90 mmHg while awake and 120/80 mmHg during sleep) and some indices of hypertensive target organ involvement, independently of the mean level of 24 h blood pressure. Methods: One hundred and thirty patients with mild-to-moderate hypertension underwent 24 h ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, ocular fundus examination, microalbuminuria assay and two-dimensional guided M-mode echocardiography. The study population was divided into subsets according to the systolic and diastolic 24 h blood pressure load values predicted from the regression equation relat…

Relationships of “ambulatory” white coat effect with target organ damage in arterial hypertension

Pulsatile and steady 24-h blood pressure components as determinants of left ventricular mass in young and middle-aged essential hypertensives

In order to explore the relations between left ventricular mass (LVM) and the pulsatile (pulse pressure) and steady (mean pressure) components of the blood pressure (BP) curve, 304 young and middle-aged essential hypertensive patients were studied by means of 24-h ambulatory BP monitoring and echocardiography. In the overall study population, both the BP components showed significant correlations with LVM. These correlations were unevenly distributed in the subgroups of subjects younger and in those older than 50 years. While in this latter subgroup, in multivariate analysis, both 24-h mean BP (24-MBP) (beta = 0.27; P = 0.008) and 24-h pulse pressure (24-h PP) (beta = 0.23; P = 0.02) were a…

In vivo cimetidine immunomodulatory effects on the cutaneous reaction to oxazolone in the chicken.

The effect of the histamine H2-receptor antagonist, cimetidine, on the cutaneous Arthus-like hypersensitivity to oxazolone elicited injecting subcutaneously oxazolone conjugated to egg-albumin (EA-OX) has been examined in the chicken. Cimetidine had opposite effects on the cutaneous reaction to oxazolone in relation to a different immunization schedule. Cimetidine enhanced the cutaneous reaction to oxazolone obtained immunizing chickens with oxazolone dissolved in ethanol (Eth-OX); instead cimetidine inhibited the cutaneous reaction obtained in chickens immunized with oxazolone dissolved in complete Freund adjuvant (CFA-OX). Optimum enhancement of the cutaneous arthus-like reaction to oxazo…

Relationships between ambulatory white coat effect and left ventricular mass in arterial hypertension

The aim of our study was to analyze, in a group of 296 essential hypertensives, the relationship between left ventricular mass (LVM) and ambulatory white coat effect (WCE); that is the difference between the elevation of the first measurements of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring and the mean daytime pressure. The study population was separated into two groups according to the median of the WCE. The LVM was greater in the groups with higher systolic and diastolic ambulatory WCE. The significant association between ambulatory WCE and LVM was confirmed by the results of multiple regression analysis, suggesting that ambulatory WCE may not be an innocent phenomenon.