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During a consultation with your doctor, measuring blood pressure is a commonplace act. But is this measurement as reliable in men as in women? This is the question posed by Canadian researchers. And the result is surprising.
At the start, Canadian researchers from the University of Montreal, Canada, asked themselves a simple question: non-invasive blood pressure (BP) measurements, carried out using a brachial cuff, allow they accurately estimate invasive (or true) aortic BP in both men and women?
Strange, the question? Not that much, given the results observed, and recently published in the American monthly review JAMA Network open.
A difference in height and weight
To answer this question, the authors gathered data from 500 volunteer patients, between January 1 and December 31, 2019. They selected 145 women and 355 men, whose average age was 66, without severe aortic stenosis. or atrial fibrillation, and undergoing cardiac catheterization in a hospital.
This allowed them to gather data regarding blood pressure measurements in an invasive way. By comparing the results, the researchers found that women had higher aortic blood pressure measured invasively than men, compared to the measurement taken with the armband.
The authors attribute this difference to height and weight: since women are mostly smaller than men, these two parameters would have significantly disturbed the measurements in women, whereas these remain reliable and unchanged in men.
Cardiovascular consequences?
If the results of blood pressure cuff measurement are possibly underestimated in women, the authors then wondered about a possible “under treatment” of these patients, compared to men, which could partly explain why women are more at risk of cardiovascular disease.
“Without getting to dramatize things, we must remember that the measuring devices, especially blood pressure, being calibrated on men, there may be differences in women.“, says Dr Gérald Kierzek, emergency physician and medical director of Doctissimo.
Consult a cardiologist online
Pay attention to the size of the cuff in self-measurement
To perform a good blood pressure measurement, it is therefore important to have good equipment.
“The measurement is preferably carried out at the doctor’s officepoints out Dr. Kierzek. If you do it at home, make sure you have the right size cuff, adapted to your build. A cuff that is too small can distort the results“.
And to add that you can also have your blood pressure taken at the pharmacy and thus benefit from health advice from a knowledgeable professional.
Reminder: for the measurement to be valid, you must take your blood pressure 3 days in a row, in a seated position, feet on the ground, back propped up, body relaxed, and after five minutes of rest, 3 times in a row at one minute. interval, morning and evening – before taking the treatment, as far as the treated persons are concerned. The voltage corresponds to the average of the 18 measurements obtained. In self-measurement, the diagnostic threshold for arterial hypertension is lower than for clinical measurement: it is 135 or 85 mmHG.