Twenty-four-hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring in infants and toddlers

During the past several years, 24-hour (24-h) ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) has become a useful tool for the diagnosis and management of children and adolescents with elevated blood pressure (BP). Some reports have also provided blood pressure nomograms for particular devices. However, there are very few reports of the use of this method in very young children. In our study we investigated the applicability of ABPM in 97 healthy infants and toddlers, aged from 2 to 30 months. A satisfactory ABPM profile was obtained in 86.6% of the children, with an averaae of 75.0% satisfactory BP recordings. The mean +/- SD systolic and diastolic BP of healthy infants and toddlers was 99 +/- 12/62 +/- 12 mmHg during the daytime and 95 +/- 11/57 +/- 10 mmHg during the night, with no gender difference being observed. The 24-h mean SD systolic and diastolic BP, which may be a more appropriate measure of BP in this particular age group, was found to be 97 +/- 12/59 +/- 11 mmHg. We also confirmed the increase in systolic and diastolic BP with increased height (length). There was only a slight nocturnal decrease in BP. We conclude that this method is applicable for the assessment of blood pressure in very young children.