Comparison of Blood Pressure Variability between 24 h Ambulatory Monitoring and Office Blood Pressure in Diabetics and Nondiabetic Patients: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Background: Evidence regarding blood pressure (BP) variability (BPV) and its independent association with adverse outcomes has grown. Diabetic patients might have increased BPV, but there is still an evidence gap regarding relation between BPV and type 2 diabetes beyond mean values of BP.

Objective: To examine the relationship between 24 h ambulatory BP monitoring (ABPM, short-term variability) and visit-to-visit in-office BPV (OBP, long-term variability), in diabetics (D) and nondiabetics (ND), and to explore BPV relation with estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), and pulse wave velocity (PWV) as indicators of target organ lesion.

Materials and methods: We conducted a single-center cross-sectional study in an outpatient BP unit, including adult patients consecutively admitted from 1999 to 2019. Multivariate was performed to compare BPV between D and ND adjusted for clinical variables. Pearson's correlation was performed to evaluate relation of BPV with eGFR and PWV.

Results: A total of 1123 patients with ABPM and OBP measurements were included. Values of eGFR and PWV were worse in D than in ND. Measurements of OBPV did not differ between groups. Of ABPM BPV, the coefficient of variation and standard deviation for daytime systolic BP were higher in D compared to ND, but only in ND did BPV correlated with both eGFR and PWV.

Conclusion: We found that diabetes is associated with higher variability of daytime BP than nondiabetics along with worse damage of vascular and renal function. However, in contrast to nondiabetics, in diabetics eGFR and PWV may not be dependent on BP variability, suggesting that other mechanisms might explain more rigorously the greater damage of target organ lesion markers.