Blood pressure readings may be wrong for overweight patients

Obese patients may be wrongly diagnosed as hypertensive because the arm cuffs used to measure their blood pressure are the wrong size, a new study has found (Blood Pressure Monitoring 2003:8:101-6).

The authors say that the larger arm size of obese people results in higher readings when the standard cuff is used. Eight per cent of the people who took part in their study might have been wrongly classed as hypertensive, say the authors, from the Institute of Cardiovascular Investigation at the Hospital Civil de …