Introduction: There is evidence suggesting the superiority of office aortic blood pressure (BP) over office brachial in the management of arterial hypertension. The 24 hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) is regarded as the optimal method for assessing BP profile; the non-invasive 24 hour aortic ABPM is now feasible.

Objective: To investigate the association and possible superiority of 24h aortic BP over 24h brachial and office BP (aortic or brachial) in the assessment of target organ damage. Non-invasive 24h aortic and brachial ABPM was performed using Mobilo-O-Graph, IEM, a validated brachial cuff based oscillometric device which calibrates the obtained brachial pressure waveform either using SBP and DBP (calib 1) or MBP and DBP (calib 2).

Design and methods: 184 subjects (mean age 55±14 years, 54% male, 48% hypertensives) underwent office brachial (b) and aortic (a) (SphygmoCor) BP assessment, 24h brachial and aortic ABPM and cardiac ultrasound.

Results: The correlation of BP indices with left ventricular mass indexed for body surface area as well as the R square values from multivariate analysis are provided in the table. Using Fisher’s z-transformation it was shown that among all SBP parameters only aSBP 24 calib2 had significantly higher correlation coefficient with LVMass compared to office brachial SBP; aSBP calib2 tended to have marginally significantly closer correlation with LVMass than aSBP calib1 (p=0.055).

Conclusion: In the present study 24h aortic SBP calibrated with MBP and DBP seems to be the best alternative to office brachial SBP to assess the association between BP and LVMass.