Blood pressure readings differ considerably according to where and how they are taken, especially when a patient already has hypertension, according to a recent systematic review and network meta-analysis in Annals of Internal Medicine .

For an accurate diagnosis of hypertension, new standards are needed for better agreement between office, at-home, or ambulatory measurements, researchers said.

“Office blood pressure measurements may be misleading owing to white-coat or masked hypertension phenomena, and current guidelines advocate for out-of-office monitoring,” said Hao-Min Cheng, MD, PhD, a cardiologist and director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Taipei, Taiwan, and an author of the study. “Only limited research has directly compa

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