[The prevalence of white coat hypertension in patients over 60 who came to a day hospital].

Over the last thirty years white coat hypertension has been the object of numerous studies which suggest that the interactions between doctor and patient and environmental, psychological circumstances suffice to determine a significant increase of arterial pressure in subjects who are generally normotense. The aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of white coat hypertension in elderly subjects with hypertension which had been diagnosed recently using the traditional sphygmomanometric method three times in the space of one week. We divided 69 patients (age range 60 to 82 years) into three groups depending on their clinic pressures, i.e. patients with isolated systolic, systo-diastolic or diastolic hypertension. Non invasive 24 h pressure ambulatory monitoring was performed in each subject using a Takeda recorder TM 2420 and adopting a protocol for single measurements at 15 minutes intervals between 08.00 and 20.00 (daytime measurements) and 30 minutes intervals between 20.00 and 08.00 (night-time measurements). Ambulatory monitoring with less than 60 recordings, and those where measurements were not taken for over 60 minutes during the day or 90 minutes during the night were excluded from the study, and the mean daytime and 24 h pressure load was calculated. Monitoring conducted in 60 subjects (39 males and 21 females) was considered valid. Statistical analysis of the mean arterial pressure values of each subject determined by the two methods was performed using a t-test.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)