This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Barnabas N. Panayiotou, MRCP
City General Hospital Staffordshire, England

JAMA. 1995;274(17):1343.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—The article by Dr Reeves¹ was very informative regarding the pitfalls of blood pressure (BP) measurement and how to optimize the accuracy of readings. Among the factors affecting accuracy, Reeves included interarm BP inequalities, but this was not discussed. I believe it is important to clarify this issue.

Reeves cited a study by Hashimoto et al² and stated that there was no significant difference in BP between the subjects' arms in that study. However, reporting the results only in this way is misleading because in that study as well as one of our own,³ many individuals (up to 23%) had an absolute interarm difference of more than 8 mm Hg in systolic BP. The highest difference in systolic and diastolic BPs was 20 mm Hg.³ Blood pressure was higher on the left arm in some individuals but higher on the right in others, . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?