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Usefulness of blood pressure measurements by community pharmacists in screening for hypertension. The screenbpharm study: A protocol

Abstract:

Measuring blood pressure (BP) by community pharmacists has demonstrated to be a useful tool for assessing BP in treated hypertensive patients. However, there is still lack of evidence on the ability of this method to identify hypertension. The general aim of the ScreenBPharm study is to assess the value of measuring BP by pharmacists in detecting hypertension in adults without a previous diagnosis and/or antihypertensive treatment. This study includes 2 phases in which BP will be measured at the pharmacy (5 visits), at home (4 days) and by 24-hour monitoring. To achieve the general aim, several key evaluations will be conducted: (1) magnitude of the white-coat effect (WCE), (2) agreement between community pharmacy (CPBP), home (HBP) and ambulatory BP (ABP), (3) diagnosis capacity of the CPBP method (sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative pbkp_redictive values; HBP and ABP as the reference), and (4) agreement between repeated CPBP measurements. The Lin correlation-concordance and the Kappa coefficients will be used to assess the agreement between methods and repeated CPBP measurements. Up to March 2014, 88 individuals have been included in the study. All of them conducted all the visits to the pharmacy and performed HBP monitoring; moreover, 49 successfully performed ABP monitoring. Future results of this study might clarify the capacity of CPBP measurements to identify hypertension and help pharmacists and physicians to make better decisions when those measurements are available.