Sixty people with high blood pressure spent a full day and night going about ordinary life with a sampler the size of a cellphone clipped at the waist. Every 20 minutes, without a needle stick, it drew fluid from just beneath the skin. What it captured was the pattern a single clinic blood draw is built to miss: repeated bursts of a blood pressure hormone, concentrated in the hours the patients were asleep.
The findings, published Aug. 26 in Science Translational Medicine, concern primary aldosteronism, a disorder in which the adrenal glands overproduce aldosterone, the hormone that governs how the body handles salt and water. It is the most common endocrine cause of secondary high blood pressure, and it is often missed. Investigators at the University of Bergen in Norway led the work, with collaborators at the University of Bristol and the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Researchers recruited patients in Bristol, Bergen, Stockholm, and Athens.
