The findings, published in two papers in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), come from the largest randomised controlled trials of blood pressure self-monitoring in pregnancy to date addressing those at risk of high blood pressure alongside those with pregnancy hypertension. Dr Katherine Tucker, lead author on the paper looking at early detection of high blood pressure and a Senior Researcher at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford said: 'Around one in ten people who are pregnant will have high blood pressure, also called hypertension. Professor Lucy Chappell, Professor of Obstetrics at King’s College London, said: 'We set up the BUMP trials to find out if home blood pressure monitoring might help early identification of hypertension in pregnancy, or the control of blood pressure for those with pregnancy hypertension.' BUMP2 focused on those who were pregnant with either existing high blood pressure or high blood pressure that appeared during pregnancy, and again assigned them to either usual care or usual care plus self-monitoring of high blood pressure with telemonitoring using an app. While we found that self-monitoring made no difference to the timing of diagnosis or control of high blood pressure, it does appear to be safe and well tolerated.
