A 15-year longitudinal study on ambulatory blood pressure tracking from childhood to early adulthood.

This study evaluates the tracking stability of office blood pressure (BP), ambulatory BP (ABP), BP variability (BPV) and nocturnal BP drops (dipping) from childhood to early adulthood, and their dependence on ethnicity, gender and family history (FH) of essential hypertension (EH). Generalized estimating equations (GEEs) were used to estimate tracking coefficients for 295 European Americans and 252 African Americans, with a maximum of 12 measurements over a 15-year period. Office BP and ABP had moderate-to-relatively high tracking coefficients (r= 0.30-0.59; P