Home Blood Pressure Monitor:the History

This lens deals with blood pressure from a non-medical perspective, and its objective is to give readers a short history behind that handy home blood pressure monitor so many have today, and reaffirm the important role of blood pressure monitors in preventive treatment. Where do the fancy automatic blood pressure monitor and wrist blood pressure monitor models of today originate from? Who was the first person to discover how to take your blood pressure ? What is the best blood pressure monitor? Why is the Omron blood pressure monitor so well regarded and where can you read a relevant and useful Omron blood pressure monitor review?

We try to cover all these points in this little lens!

Who took the first blood pressure test?

The eighteenth century English church minister Rev. Stephen Hales was the first to conduct blood pressure tests;he did it by inserting tubes directly into the arteries of animals. In 1896 Riva Rocci, an Italian Physician was credited with making the first conventional sphygmomanometer (sphygna-WHAT??) to measure blood pressure;before that, there was little evidence of non-invasive methods of measurement being used on people. In layman's terms, it is an instrument for measuring arterial blood pressure with a stethoscope

"Korotkoff sounds" and Cushing

Russian doctor and scientist,Nikolai Korotkoff, in 1905 developed this further by discovering while treating traumatized lims in soldiers that specific sounds (later called "Korotkoff sounds")could be heard with a stethoscope whilst carrying out a deflation of a Riva Rocci cuff. In 1901, just before Korotkoff's discovery,Riva Rocci's non-invasive way of measuring intra-arterial pressure,had been enthusiastically adopted and brought to the USA by Cushing, who used it in 1901 officially while carrying out anesthetic procedures.

Blood pressure-Cause of absenteeism and presenteeism

Around the world blood pressure measurement has become an essential,mandatory exercise,whether using an automatic blood pressure monitor, a wrist blood pressure monitor, or whatever, simply because of the fact that it has helped detect 93% of adverse events,which could occur during anesthesia.

Productive people around the world,particularly those in developed countries, have been found to be greatly (and negatively) impacted by hypertension. Recent estimates show that 50 million adults in the USA alone are affected. Because it is "symptom-less" in people, it makes it all the harder to detect. However it is a major cause of both absenteeism and presenteeism at work, such are its destructive effects. It is clearly a major problem that needs addressing, as it is reported to cost U.S businesses over $30 billion a year. Because obesity is directly related to the condition, and because more and more youth are overweight,the problem is being accentuated still further. All the more reason to choose the right blood pressure monitor.

Presenteeism is a term for when someone shows up to work but is, to all intents and purposes, dysfunctional because of an illness. It is difficult to measure presenteeism and so data is hard to come by;nevertheless, rough estimates point to an annual cost to companies of $247 per employee with hypertension.

And Europe is not immune as it is reported that one fourth of its citizens struggle with hypertension!

New concerns regarding blood pressure are very frequently raised in medical magazines and literature.

A study published in the "Lancet", the world's leading medical journal, overturns the conventional wisdom that night time blood pressure measurements are of greater predictive value for blood pressure and heart issues,finding that blood pressure conditions during the daytime are equally valuable in the prediction of fatal and non-fatal outcomes. Pre-hypertension, a new category of early-stage high blood pressure is increasing in prevalence with children, and this is another worry. If untreated and undetected it has been found to lead to early organ damage during their adolescent years.

The impact of blood pressure conditions on the population in the world is so great now many nations have embarked upon studying happiness of their citizens by correlating it to the presence and or absence in addition to the economic indices as the GDP, economic growth rate, etc. The happier a country's people the less the prevalence of reported blood pressure cases? This would certainly seem so, according to tentative statistics that include the questions on blood pressure and happiness among citizens. Examples of the "happy campers" are countries like Sweden and the Netherlands, which report that 48.5% of their citizens are very satisfied with their lives. Countries like Germany,Portugal and Finland fall in to the second category, with satisfaction indices being down as low as 22%.

We conclude then that controlling blood pressure and hypertension should be top priorities, as should be the need of good clinical standards and correct instruments.

Check out a Omron Blood Pressure monitor review (link)

Omron is a well-known brand in this field, although there are others you could investigate. We mention Omron as it is one of the most used and trusted brands. The Healthcare Division of Omron makes and markets health-care products used by consumers and professionals such as digital blood pressure monitors, but also products like digital thermometers, body-fat meters; and offers medical systems and services. It started life as the 1948 as Tateisi Electric Manufacturing Company and it now has over 18 500 employees and had sales in excess of USD 4.6 billion in 1998.

One of the most popular models of omron blood pressure monitor is the omron blood pressure monitor 711ac.

It is a world leader in the manufacture of blood pressure monitors. It would pay to read up an Omron blood pressure monitor Review or two if you are serious about finding the best blood pressure monitor for your needs.