FAQ
Why is blood pressure measurement so important?
Blood pressure must be maintained above a certain level to perfuse tissues, thereby ensuring:
- Nutrient supply to organs and tissues
- Exchange and excretion of metabolic waste products
- Tissue oxygenation
However, the blood pressure must not be too high, since high pressure in the arteries damages them and/or causes the heart to work too hard pumping blood against the pressure which is higher than normal.
The measurement of an animal’s blood pressure (BP) has a wide range of indications. BP measurement is clinically significant in (early) diagnosis of a variety of diseases (particularly hypertension), in pain management, monitoring of ICU patients and during anesthesia and also when certain medications are being used. BP measurement therefore needs to be an integral part of EVERY veterinary practice and should be used routinely.
Routine Screening
- General health check-ups
- Geriatric screening programs
- Non-specific symptoms
- Vaccination appointments
- Diseases accompanied by hemodynamic changes, especially renal disease, hyperthyroidism, diabetes mellitus, hyperadrenocorticism and heart disease
Emergency Medicine
- Shock Trauma
- Pericardial effusion
- Poisoning
- Addisonian crisis
Intensive Care Monitoring
- Postoperative monitoring
- Hypertensive crisis
- Protracted shock
Treatment Planning and Assessment
- Cardiac patients
- In all patients treated for hypertension and hypotension
- When administering drugs that effect the blood pressure, especially ACE inhibitors, diuretics, calcium channel blockers, beta blockers, vasodilators, sympathomimetics, sedatives
Anesthesia Monitoring
- Pre-anesthetic examination
- Intraoperative monitoring
- Postoperative surveillance
Source: Egner, Carr and Brown: “Essential Facts of Blood Pressure in Dogs and Cats”
What is the petMAP?
What does oscillometric blood pressure system mean?
How accurate are the petMAP blood pressure readings?
View abstracts on petMAP’s accuracy.
petMAP Manual states “…….. has been optimized for accuracy by comparison to intra-arterial BP measurements in dogs and cats…..”. BP is displayed within +/- 2 mmHg. This does not mean however that every reading displayed by the petMAP will be within those limits of display accuracy. BP changes more than that each time the animal breathes, but the optimizations built into petMAP for species and cuff site have been developed to make the petMAP correlate with simultaneously measured intra-arterial BP better than previous generations of BP devices. No device will ever read the BP perfectly since the BP is always changing with each heart beat, particularly if the animal is not totally relaxed.