Best blood pressure monitors for at-home use
Around one in three adults in the UK experience high blood pressure, but charities estimate that a worrying half of those affected remain undiagnosed.
Left unchecked, high blood pressure can lead to a range of more serious issues, like heart disease, stroke, kidney damage, or a heart attack, so it’s important to know your risk.
The tricky thing about high blood pressure is that it rarely has any symptoms, which is why it’s often dubbed a ‘silent killer’. The only way we can know our levels are healthy is by using a simple piece of kit called a blood pressure monitor.
At-home blood pressure monitors have been available for quite some time now, but advancements in technology have made them more accessible, accurate and user-friendly in recent years. These handheld devices consist of a soft cuff that wraps around your upper arm, which inflates and deflates automatically. The cuff measures the pressure of blood flowing through your arteries and displays the reading digitally on a screen, making it easy to record your results without medical training.
How do I know if I have high blood pressure?
When you use a blood pressure monitor, it feeds you two important numbers: systolic and diastolic pressure. Systolic pressure, or the higher number on the screen, represents the pressure in your arteries when your heart beats and pumps blood out into the body.
Diastolic pressure, which is the lower number, is