(HealthDay News) — With proper training, people with high blood pressure may be able to control it more effectively on their own at home than through conventional methods, British researchers contend.
Through telemonitoring of their blood pressure and adjusting their medications according to guidelines agreed upon in advance, patients assigned to self-managed care saw greater reductions in blood pressure after six and 12 months than patients receiving standard care through health professionals, the study found.
“Self-management represents an important new intervention for people with hypertension treated in primary care,” said lead researcher Dr. Richard J. McManus, a professor of primary care cardiovascular research and honorary consultant at the University of Birmingham in England.
Self-management should be considered for people with hypertension, particularly if their blood pressure is not controlled with standard care, McManus added.
But the self-managed approach is not without drawbacks, McManus noted.
“Caveats are that not everyone will want to do self-management and that family doctors need to be involved in setting up the titration schedules for individuals to follow,” he said.
High blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart attack, heart failure, stroke and renal (kidney) failure, but only half the people treated for it have their blood pressure controlled, according to background information in the study.
For the study, published in the July 8 online edition of The Lancet, McManus’s team randomly assigned 527 patients with high blood pressure, also known as hypertension, to either self-managed care or to standard care.
Taking daily blood pressure readings over six months, patients managing their own care saw a drop in systolic blood pressure (the top number in a 120/80 reading) of 12.9 mm Hg, while patients on standard therapy saw only a 9.2 mm Hg drop in systolic pressure, the researchers found.
After a year, systolic pressure in the self-managed group fell 17.6 mm Hg, compared with 12.2 mm Hg in the standard care group.
Patients without diabetes were encouraged to aim for 130/85 mm Hg, and diabetics were to target 130/75 mm Hg, according to the study.
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i take texturna and hytrin and it keeps my blood pressure at 130/55, after about a year on these on average!
I bought a home blood pressure device at Cosco as soon as I began having high readings at the doctor’s office, and use it a few times per week. I am on medication, but able to keep it down to safe levels. It is really fun to use it and see low scores come up!
I go to government clinic in my country. The nurses always take reading and it is always high. If I keep to the doctor’s prescription, my blood pressure would have dropped to dead low I believe. So I adjusted my prescription and I take my own blood pressure a few times a day. Each time, it is done with at least 3 readings on each arm. First reading on each arm I always discard and I took the average of the 4 readings. Lately, I had been taking some supplements which help lower the readings. To confirm that, I went out and bought another meter and do cross check so now I know exactly what my average reading is. If I follow the readings of the nurses and follow the prescriptions, I would have been consuming at least 3 times the dosage I am taking now over the last 5 years ! Can you imagine that ? I really think there is something wrong in this doctor/nurse/patient process and it is not helping anyone except the drugs manufacturers.