3 - Non-Invasive Blood Pressure Monitoring

Summary

In anesthesiology and critical care medicine, specific arterial blood pressure targets should be attained, depending on the setting. For instance, a growing body of evidence indicates that perioperative blood pressure should not markedly deviate from its usual level. This underscores the importance of blood pressure measurement, ideally non-invasively, and has therefore spurred intense research efforts . Recent advances in non-invasive blood pressure monitoring are noteworthy. They involve not only innovative technologies such as the automatic finger cuff but also the widely used automatic upper arm cuff. The present chapter aims at providing a state of the art of non-invasive blood pressure monitoring in adult patients in acute care settings with emphasis on recent advances. This chapter addresses several key issues such as “are non-invasive measurements of blood pressure true and accurate?”, “can non-invasive monitoring detect changes in blood pressure? ” and “what if the patient is obese and / or has cardiac arrhythmia?”