Software system for the computation of blood pressure elevations in the assessment of hypertension

Hardware for automatic long-term measurement has been wedded to a set of software modules for the computation of time-specified tolerance intervals in the design of a computer-based system for the assessment of hypertension. The variability of blood pressure is such that the identification and the proper definition of hypertension are highly ambiguous when based on single measurements. The first step to deal with such variability is to replace the constant limits for blood pressure used in the assessment of hypertension with a time-specified reference interval. Once such a threshold, the hyperbaric index, can be computed by numerical integration as the total area of any given patient´s blood pressure above the threshold. In order to examine the extent of normal physiological excess, we analyzed systolic, mean arterial and diastolic blood pressure and heart rate, automatically monitored in clinically healthy subjects. The data were used to obtain 90% tolerance intervals for each gender separately. The hyperbaric index was then computed for each individual blood pressure profile. The values obtained represent a testable threshold for the assessment of hypertension. This software system for the establishment of time-qualified tolerance limits and the assessment of the extent and timing of blood pressure elevation may serve to help in prognosis and diagnosis with a better assessment of health status, to initiate treatment if needed, to time treatment when it is most desirable and least harmful in terms of undesired effects, and to gauge the subject´s response to treatment