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High prevalence of hypertension along with its serious complications in the organs have made this disease an important health problem worldwide. The lack of symptoms is the most important sign of hypertension and the prevalent remedies have not been effective in controlling the disease yet. Meanwhile, monitoring blood pressure at home and at workplace and antistress management may be some of the effective methods. The purpose of the study was to compare the self-measured blood pressure (BP) at home, at work and in outpatient clinics as estimates of true BP, and to determine the effectiveness of antistress management training for normalization of blood pressure levels in workers diagnosed with borderline hypertension.
In quasi-experimental, transversal design with intragroup analysis for pre - postintervention study, 32 male workers who do easy manual jobs were included into the stress management program. Before and after the treatment, the study group of patients had three self-measured readings of BP taken. After the antistress management program, based on the self-measured and ambulance BP values, the real levels of BP were compared as part of a controlled study of stress management training for essential hypertension.
Analyses showed that (a) self-measured BP values at home in the morning and evening were significantly correlated with each other, but these values at work and home did not correlate at pretreatment, (b) the correlation coefficients for SBP readings taken at posttreatment between work and home self-measured BP values were both statistically significant and high (r is less than 0.60), (c) after antistress management training, over time, intraclass correlations of self-measured BPs were significantly higher than those of ambulance and pre-intervention.
Findings indicating that self-measurement is a valuable alternative or supplement to outpatient BP measurement, especially at workplace, could provide a reliable estimate of the level of BP. The antistress management intervention may be effective in lowering and stabilazing BPs for working individuals who perceived symptoms of work-related stress.
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