Blood pressures higher in the home than in the clinic in rural Kenya.

The conditions under which blood pressures (BPs) are recorded are critical, and it has been demonstrated several times that BPs measured in the home are lower than those measured in the clinic. However, these comparisons are based on home BPs measured by the patients or their friends and relatives and clinic BPs measured by doctors and nurses. To our knowledge, no comparison of home and clinic BPs measured by the same observer has been reported, and we present the results of such a study which is the first to demonstrate higher BPs in the home environment, perhaps reflecting the unacculturated nature of the study population.