Dr. T. Lancaster 6 Senior Clinical Lecturer Prof. J Ledingham 1 Professor of Medicine 1. Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. 2. Department of Cardiology, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Fulham Rd., London, SW3 4. Holloway Surgery, Holloway, Cowley, Oxford 5. Didcot Health Centre, Britwell Rd, Didcot, Oxfordshire 6.
Ambulatory monitoring is, therefore, a better method to detect white coat hypertension.
Secondly, ambulatory recording gives information on BP at different periods of the day and night and during different activities. A large scale prospective study is therefore urgently needed to answer these questions. Fears have been expressed about the widespread introduction of ABPM into general practice in the absence of sufficient information about its prognostic value. Possible future uses of this study Recent advances in molecular biology have stimulated interest in the possibility of identifying the molecular basis of genetic predisposition to hypertension. Despite rapid progress in molecular genetics, application to human hypertension still presents formidable problems and will require collection of samples from a large number of well-characterised pedigrees.