Blood Pressure Monitoring in Cardiovascular Medicine and Therapeutics provides information that will be especially useful to all who care for hyperten sive patients. The various chapters provide a full account of the mounting sci entific evidence that blood pressure recordings need to be obtained for proper diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy for these patients. The contributors are each directly involved in clinical studies ofhome and ambulatory blood pressure moni toring, as well as of the relationship of circadian variations in heart rate and blood pressure to cardiovascular events. As a longtime observer of the multiple facets of clinical hypertension, I have been greatly impressed with the rapid advances in this area over the last two decades. Out-of-office blood pressure monitoring has grown from a curi osity to a necessity. In order to improve the currently inadequate control of hypertension throughout the world, such monitoring should become routine in the diagnosis and treatment of every patient. The evidence for the role of out-of-office monitoring that is so well described in Blood Pressure Monitoring in Cardiovascular Medicine and Therapeutics should serve as a stimulus for the more widespread adoption of the procedure. Once this is understood, the constraints on the broader clinical use of ambulatory monitoring that now exist in the United States will be lifted as the value of such information becomes more generally recognized. In the meantime, self-recorded home measurements should be more widely utilized.
