Forearm Blood Pressure Measurement in Compare with Standard Method

Blood pressure measurement (BPM) is the most common useful part of physical examination and patient assessment. And almost all physician and most of nurses use it for this mean. There are several methods for BPM and the most usefully of them is the standard method, by use of stethoscope and sphygmomanometer via brachial artery. When the upper arm (area from shoulder to elbow) is inaccessible and/or a standard-sized blood pressure cuff does not fit, some healthcare workers use the forearm to measure blood pressure. Nevertheless evidence supporting this practice is limited. In this study 80 patients that admitted to Mustafa Khomeini hospital were evaluated by over all 320 times measurements to compare forearm BPM and standard method (half of them by new method and the rest by standard method). In this study forearm mean diastolic BP was 75.2±11.6 in compare with 74.1±13.3 in standard BPM (correlation coefficient: 0.83, p<0.000). Also by paired T test, there was no significant difference between these measurements (p<0.223). Mean systolic BP in forearm BPM and standard method were 127.8±27.8 and 129.5±25.6 consequently (correlation coefficient: 0.95, p<0.000). Also there was no significant difference between them by paired t- test (p<0.094). These findings showed that forearm BPM can successfully used instead of standard method at least in some situations that upper arm or suitable cuff are inaccessible.