CORRELATION OF LENGTHY HOSPITAL RECORDS OF BLOOD PRESSURE WITH NEPHROSCLEROSIS1

Abstract

Tracy, R. E. (Dept. Pathology, Louisiana State Univ. School of Medicine, New Orleans, La. 70112). Correlation of lengthy hospital records of blood pressure with nephrosclerosis. Amer. J. Epid., 1970, 97: 32–37.—Blood pressure histories spanning a long period of time in the hospital records of a series of autopsied patients were examined to evaluate their utility for clinical-pathological correlations with tissue changes seen in the kidneys. Such records are found to have certain important limitations for this purpose, but some ways to extract maximum value from them are suggested. Mean blood pressures having a level course over a period of years were averaged and correlated with certain quantitative measures of nephrosclerosis in a preliminary series of 69 cases. Although the effect of heart failure in some hypertensive patients could not be fully evaluated, this series appears to contain no cases having hypertension without nephrosclerosis or vice versa. In this series of cases, the estimate of average mean blood pressure obtained by examining the renal tissue was about as good on the average as a measurement of blood pressure by sphygmomanometer taken at one hospital visit. It is suggested that the methods developed here could be employed for epidemiologic investigation.