Background: The lack of nocturnal decline in blood pressure has been associated with an increase in end-organ damage and cardiovascular events, although results remain controversial, partly because of the inability to reproduce correctly, over time, the classification of patients into dippers and non-dippers. Moreover, the non-dipping status has been frequently related to an increase in nocturnal activity, differences in quality of sleep, or both.
Objective: To assess the relationship between activity and blood pressure in patients with hypertension.
Methods: We studied 306 mild-to-moderately hypertensive patients (130 men), 53.7 +/- 14.0 years of age (mean +/- SD). Blood pressure and heart rate were measured for 48 consecutive hours, at 20-min intervals during the day and at 30-min intervals at night, using an ambulatory device, and physical activity was simultaneously evaluated at 1-min intervals by wrist actigraphy. Circadian parameters of blood pressure, heart rate and activity established by population multiple-components analysis were compared between dippers and non-dippers, by non-parametric testing. Diurnal and nocturnal means of blood pressure and activity were computed for each patient according to individual resting hours determined by actigraphy, and compared among groups by analysis of variance.
Results: Despite highly statistically significant differences between dippers and non-dippers with respect to nocturnal means and in each hourly nightly mean of blood pressure, there were no differences between them for the same parameters during activity, whether or not the patients were receiving medication at the time of monitoring. The average duration of sleep and the 24-h mean and standard deviation of activity were also similar between the groups.
Conclusions: The highly significantly different circadian variation in blood pressure between dippers and non-dippers with essential hypertension is not related to a significant increase in nocturnal physical activity. Differences in blood pressure could, however, be related to the absence of 24-h therapeutic coverage in most non-dipper patients receiving antihypertensive medication.