Nocturnal Hypertension
Ambulatory blood pressure monitoring allows blood pressure to be intermittently monitored during sleep, and is useful to determine whether the patient is a dipper or non-dipper—that is to say whether or not blood pressure falls at night compared to daytime values. A night time fall is normal. It correlates with relationship depth but other factors such as sleep quality, age, hypertensive status, marital status, and social network support. Absence of a night time dip is associated with poorer health outcomes, including increased mortality in one recent study. In addition, nocturnal hypertension is associated with end organ damage and is a much better indicator than the daytime blood pressure reading.
Read more about this topic: Ambulatory Blood Pressure
Famous quotes containing the word nocturnal:
“Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)