Blood Pressure Monitor History
We look in this article at blood pressure from a non-medical stance and its objective is to give readers a brief “Blood pressure moniitor history”, an appraisal of the negative impact of blood pressure on human health, and a brief look at the role of blood pressure monitors in preventing these negative health conditions.
The eighteenth century English Church minister Stephen Hales was the first to conduct blood pressure tests;he did it by inserting tubes directly into the arteries of animals. Until 1896, when an Italian physician called Riva Rocci came up with the first conventional sphygmomanometer to measure blood pressure,we don’t really get any evidence of non-invasive measurement techniques being used on people. In layman’s terms, it is an instrument for measuring arterial blood pressure with a stethoscope.
This was further developed by Russian doctor and scientist Nikolai Korotkoff, who in 1905 discovered that precise sounds could be heard using a stethoscope,whilst undertaking a dflation of a Riva Rocci cuff on a patient. Cushing in America , in the meantime, had caused the Riva Rocci measurement techniques (using a wall-mounted mercury manometer linked to a balloon-inflated cuff), to be officially used while carrying out anesthetic procedures.
Productive people around the world,particularly those in developed countries, have been found to be greatly (and negatively) impacted by hypertension. Recent estimates show that 50 million adults in the USA alone are affected. Because it is “symptom-less” in people, it makes it all the harder to detect. However it is a major cause of both absenteeism and presenteeism at work, such are its destructive effects.
It is clearly a major problem that needs addressing, as it is reported to cost U.S businesses over billion a year. Because obesity is directly related to the condition, and because more and more youth are overweight,the problem is being accentuated still further in this new and unlikely group of people.
Presenteeism is a term for when someone shows up to work but is, to all intents and purposes, dysfunctional because of an illness. It is difficult to measure presenteeism and so data is hard to come by;nevertheless, rough estimates point to an annual cost to companies of 7 per employee with hypertension.And Europe is not immune as it is reported that one fourth of its citizens struggle with hypertension.
Pre-hypertension, a new category of early-stage high blood pressure is increasing in prevalence with children, and this is another worry. If untreated and undetected it has been found to lead to early organ damage during their adolescent years.The impact of blood pressure conditions on the population in the world is so great now many nations have embarked upon studying the happiness of their citizens by correlating it to the presence and or absence of blood pressure-in addition to the usual economic indices of GDP, economic growth rate, etc.
The happier a country’s people the less the prevalence of reported blood pressure cases? This would certainly seem so, according to tentative statistics that include the questions on blood prressure and happiness among citizens. Examples of the “happy campers” are countries like Sweden and the Netherlands, which report that 48.5% of their citizens are very satisfied with their lives. Countries like Germany, Portugal and Finland fall in to the second category, with satisfaction indices being down as low as 22%.
We conclude then that controlling blood pressure and hypertension should be top priorities, as should be the need of good clinical standards and correct instruments.
Omron is a well-known brand in this field, although there are others you could investigate. Omron’s history is simply that it started life as the Tateisi Electric Manufacturing Company and it has grown to be one of the world leaders with thousands of staff and sales in excess of USD 4.6 billion in 1998. In Hales’ time blood pressure monitors were a little bit hit-and-miss.
With an Omron automatic blood pressure monitor or wrist blood pressure monitor you are much more likely to get accuracy and comfort from the device!
We mention Omron as it is one of the most trusted brand leaders. It would pay to have read Blood pressure Monitor Reviews before buying.
