The role of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring in chronic and end-stage renal disease.

In the past 30 years or so, the introduction of 24-h ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) has enabled a more comprehensive estimate of a patient's true blood pressure (BP) and its changes. Although this tool has been used in the general population for the diagnosis of white coat hypertension, its role in the clinical management of patients with chronic and end-stage kidney disease is less well defined. In patients with kidney disease, routine clinic and dialysis center BP measurements may be poor indicators of BP control. Loss of the normal nocturnal decline in BP is also common. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that this loss, which ABPM alone can detect, is associated with poor renal and cardiovascular outcomes. To slow the progression of renal disease and lessen cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in patients with kidney disease, tight BP control is needed. However, the traditional methods of measuring BP intermittently in the medical setting may fail to provide an accurate picture of BP load. Ambulatory or some form of home BP monitoring should be more widely adopted in patients with chronic and end-stage renal disease.