DOES HOME NOCTURNAL BLOOD PRESSURE MONITORING AFFECT SLEEP QUALI-TY? AN EXPLORATIVE STUDY

Objective: Background: Nocturnal blood pressure (BP) is recognised as an important predictor of cardiovascular risk. In clinical practice, nocturnal BP is evaluated by means of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring which can be poorly tolerated by patients due to its interference with sleep quality, possibly leading to inaccurate estimation of nocturnal BP. Nocturnal home BP devices (NHBPd) offer new perspectives for measuring BP during sleep. However, their impact on sleep quality is still largely unknown. Objective: we aimed to evaluate whether use of NHBPd is associated with subjective and objective sleep disruption.Design and method: Design and Methods: we recruited treated and untreated adult patients with hypertension. Patients were equipped with a NHBPd (NightView, OMRON Healthcare, HEM9601T-E3) and asked to measure BP every night over 1 week using the producer-recommended measurement schedule (automatic BP measurements programmed at 2:00 AM, 4:00 AM and 4 hours after switching the NHBPd to nocturnal mode). Sleep quality was evaluated subjectively through a Likert scale and objectively though a full polysomnography during which a subset of the included patients was asked to wear the NHBPd. In de-tail, the presence of sleep arousals was evaluated (based on EEG analysis) by an independent sleep technologist before and after automatic BP measurements. Results: Results: 173 patients were included in the study. The main characteristics are summarised as fol-lows: age 60±11 years, 73 (42%) females, BMI 28.4±5.10 Kg/m2. Office systolic and diastolic BP were 131.45±15.69 mmHg and 79.38±10.67 mmHg, respectively. After one week 102 (79%) patients subjectively reported adequate sleep quality, whilst 31 (20%) patients complained of disturbed sleep. In a subset of the included patients (n=14) a total of 114 BP measurements during polysomnography were evaluated. Arousals following cuff inflation by NHBPd were seen in less than 10% BP meas-urements (Figure 1) Conclusions: Conclusions: in this exploratory study, NHBPd was overall well tolerated and in most patients was not associated with significant objective and subjective sleep disruption. Further real-life studies are needed to confirm these findings but our data suggest that NHBPd may be useful in assessing noc-turnal BP in patients who poorly tolerate ABPM.