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Apple Watch's New High Blood Pressure Detection Feature Now Available

joeblough said:
no, i'm not on meds - but losing weight clearly dropped my average BP as shown by the Omron app. a 24-hour test would definitely be interesting.

my BP still spikes at the doctor but the spikes are 15-20 points less on systolic, and 10 points less on diastolic.
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That's great. Congratulations on the weight loss - I've just started that journey.
 
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Entilzha said:
I get nightly updates from my Bipap machine and the app, so I already know the watch wouldn’t detect anything. I went from 60+ events per hour to 1-2 per night. :D

Turning on apnea detection would be completely useless for me, thankfully!
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That's a huge improvement, congratulations. I'm not on CPAP at the moment since I lost enough weight to reduce my nightly events, so it was deemed unnecessary. I have since gained some weight and my watch started reporting an elevated number recently.
joeblough said:
do you actually see anything in the 'breathing disturbances' though? i have diagnosed sleep apnea and always sleep with an AW10. on the nights i don't use my CPAP, the AW never, ever says i have had a breathing disturbance. for sure it's never once read "elevated" but the little dots are very slightly off the axis - sometimes.

where is the 30-day PDF? i don't see it in Health under Breathing Disturbances.
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It seems that the Health app has to detect an increase of disturbances, then it retroactively creates the heuristic for you from previous data. I may be wrong on that. So to make it actually show the graph there needs to be a sustained increase from the previous 30 days. Personally I haven't noticed anything during my waking hours, but my sleep is more disturbed so it's a good warning for me. If you're on CPAP most of the time you may never see such data.
 
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azhava said:
Funny thing is, if you use a home device to measure BP it's recommended that you not have any stimulants beforehand (i.e. caffeine, nicotine, etc.), and that you sit quietly in a relaxed environment for at least 5 minutes before taking your BP readings.

When you go to a doc in the middle of the day you've already had 3 cups of coffee, you're stressed out from the traffic on the drive there, then you walk however far to get into the office and have the additional stress of the fact that it's a doctor's appointment. You sit in the waiting room doom scrolling, listening to screaming kids and bellyaching people until 45 minutes past your appointment time, which has you steamed because wtf, my appointment was 45 minutes ago. They finally take you in, put you on the scale, which shows 5 pounds heavier than your actual weight because you're fully clothed, stressing you out further, and then they slap a BP cuff right on you and take a reading. Gee, my BP is elevated? You don't say?!? 😆
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Also, standing up is supposed to help, as well a short walk. When you are at the Dr.'s you've probably been sitting for quite a while waiting and then sitting again when you go into the room.
 
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joeblough said:
yeah my point being that if you are sitting at home relaxing and taking your BP, that may not be representative of the majority of your day. and if that's the case, you might be running elevated BPs without realizing it.

i do think it's all a question of degrees. but for a long time i was fooling myself thinking that i was fine, when i really was at the opening stages of hypertension.
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The standards for normal BP (i.e. <120/80) are based on people being in a rested state. You're trying to capture a baseline. A patient should not be criticized for taking a relaxed reading and acting like it's some sort of fake reading. Common sense suggests that any normal human will have increased BP in times of stress.

If your stress is chronic enough i.e. majority of your day as you said, then perhaps the better treatment would be CBT and/or anxiety medication.
 
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I think this will be the biggest feature ever of the Apple Watch. We always hear how high blood pressure is the silent killer - until today. I'm sure it will cause a rush of people getting people into the doctor's office soon - I think they said they expected a million cases the first year. This is pretty exciting stuff.
 
joeblough said:
yeah my point being that if you are sitting at home relaxing and taking your BP, that may not be representative of the majority of your day. and if that's the case, you might be running elevated BPs without realizing it.

i do think it's all a question of degrees. but for a long time i was fooling myself thinking that i was fine, when i really was at the opening stages of hypertension.
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If you refer to any medical source anywhere which talks about how to take proper blood pressure measurements, the recommendations are largely identical. This is straight from the website of the American Heart Association, with their instructions on how to measure your BP at home:

AHA_BP.jpg
 
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So I’ve enabled it but it isn’t showing any data yet in Apple Health. I figured since it’s just an algorithm applied to existing data that it would “backfill” but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
 
FattiesGoneWild said:
I have hypertension and still turned it on. Why? To see if my medicine is still effective or not over time.
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I suspect the requirement that the user not already have hypertension is an FDA stipulation. The FDA has a separate approval process for health trackers where they have to specify they don’t actually treat medical conditions. If a person already has hypertension, then the hypertension alerts could be interpreted as treating an existing medical condition.
 
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azhava said:
If you refer to any medical source anywhere which talks about how to take proper blood pressure measurements, the recommendations are largely identical. This is straight from the website of the American Heart Association, with their instructions on how to measure your BP at home:

View attachment 2549501
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not sure the relevance of this. of course there has to be a protocol for taking BPs or else you can't compare them. not trying to say that relaxing while taking your BP is improper, i'm saying that just because it's low in this setting does not mean that it's not elevated at work, while driving, etc. if you spend 50% of your day in a high stress state then your resting BP does not reflect your BP for most of the day.

two different doctors have told me this relative to my white coat hypertension and home readings that are apparently "fine". having lost all that weight, i've driven both my home BP and stress BP down. that's my point. if you can get your stress BPs into a more normal range, you're going to be healthier.
 
seankndy said:
The standards for normal BP (i.e. <120/80) are based on people being in a rested state. You're trying to capture a baseline. A patient should not be criticized for taking a relaxed reading and acting like it's some sort of fake reading. Common sense suggests that any normal human will have increased BP in times of stress.

If your stress is chronic enough i.e. majority of your day as you said, then perhaps the better treatment would be CBT and/or anxiety medication.
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thanks dr. seankndy. advice not applicable to me.

my whole point here is only that writing off high BP as "white coat syndrome" can be detrimental to your health. as mentioned i've had a cardiologist and a GP tell me this, and they were right.
 
Good to know. However it is not yet available in my country. Hopefully it will get the required clearance and will be launching soon.
 
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azhava said:
Funny thing is, if you use a home device to measure BP it's recommended that you not have any stimulants beforehand (i.e. caffeine, nicotine, etc.), and that you sit quietly in a relaxed environment for at least 5 minutes before taking your BP readings.

When you go to a doc in the middle of the day you've already had 3 cups of coffee, you're stressed out from the traffic on the drive there, then you walk however far to get into the office and have the additional stress of the fact that it's a doctor's appointment. You sit in the waiting room doom scrolling, listening to screaming kids and bellyaching people until 45 minutes past your appointment time, which has you steamed because wtf, my appointment was 45 minutes ago. They finally take you in, put you on the scale, which shows 5 pounds heavier than your actual weight because you're fully clothed, stressing you out further, and then they slap a BP cuff right on you and take a reading. Gee, my BP is elevated? You don't say?!? 😆
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there's too much truth in this
 
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azhava said:
Funny thing is, if you use a home device to measure BP it's recommended that you not have any stimulants beforehand (i.e. caffeine, nicotine, etc.), and that you sit quietly in a relaxed environment for at least 5 minutes before taking your BP readings.

When you go to a doc in the middle of the day you've already had 3 cups of coffee, you're stressed out from the traffic on the drive there, then you walk however far to get into the office and have the additional stress of the fact that it's a doctor's appointment. You sit in the waiting room doom scrolling, listening to screaming kids and bellyaching people until 45 minutes past your appointment time, which has you steamed because wtf, my appointment was 45 minutes ago. They finally take you in, put you on the scale, which shows 5 pounds heavier than your actual weight because you're fully clothed, stressing you out further, and then they slap a BP cuff right on you and take a reading. Gee, my BP is elevated? You don't say?!? 😆
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Exactly this and couple more things I could add. It's best to just get your own BP cuff and one that has an app to go with it that keeps your entire history in it, and then show it to your Dr. on your visit. That's what I did.
 
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joeblough said:
thanks dr. seankndy. advice not applicable to me.

my whole point here is only that writing off high BP as "white coat syndrome" can be detrimental to your health. as mentioned i've had a cardiologist and a GP tell me this, and they were right.
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DotCom2 said:
Exactly this and couple more things I could add. It's best to just get your own BP cuff and one that has an app to go with it that keeps your entire history in it, and then show it to your Dr. on your visit. That's what I did.
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True, and you'll find taking your own BP readings is quite educational. For instance, I had a cuff that broke after a few years. I then bought a wrist-based cuff from Amazon (highly inaccurate) and went back to the arm-based Omron cuff (standard). In addition to the readings feeding the Apple's Health app through the Omron app, I log my readings manually via a Numbers spreadsheet. Once you have the routine down you can get a sense of the invisible factors that affect BP like stress and stimulants.

My experience with wrist-based cuffs doesn't give me much optimism about Apple's forays into the BP space, at least in terms of accuracy. The physics of measuing BP at the extremities make it hard to pin down unless you have the positional sweet spot with your arm folded in properly. And of course, the Apple Watch is positioned on the wrist. Upper-arm cuffs tend to be a lot more forgiving.
 
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Anyone lost access to this in the UK?

Just unpaired my S10 and paired with my new 17PM and got a notification saying notifications are no longer available in my region.

Restarted both, but no luck. Device regions all set to UK.
 
morganperry said:
Anyone lost access to this in the UK?

Just unpaired my S10 and paired with my new 17PM and got a notification saying notifications are no longer available in my region.

Restarted both, but no luck. Device regions all set to UK.
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Yes, exactly the same....I am in the U.K and it was working fine earlier in the week. Set up my devices as new today and got the same notification.🤷‍♂️

Device regions are set correctly to the UK

*Update: Mine just started working again after I took Blood oxygen reading and an ECG on my Apple Watch.
no rebooting, no repairing - just a notification to say it was available again 🤷‍♂️
 
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bookcase said:
I guess I misunderstood this feature. Since I've been on meds for the past two years, this will be pointless for me. But kudos for a feature that could save lives!
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I don’t agree. I’ve had to up my med dosage twice in the past. That’s because you can have your BP settled, but it can drift later on, requiring a stronger dose. It makes no sense to me for the set-up process for this feature to dismiss people previously diagnosed with hypertension. I want the BP monitored for future drifting.
 
Edd70 said:
I don’t agree. I’ve had to up my med dosage twice in the past. That’s because you can have your BP settled, but it can drift later on, requiring a stronger dose. It makes no sense to me for the set-up process for this feature to dismiss people previously diagnosed with hypertension. I want the BP monitored for future drifting.
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So lie when you are setting it up when it asks, and say no. It's not a Truth-o-Meter. That's what I did.
 
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