Get your BP reading right

Experts state reading blood pressure the right way is essential to prevent heart attacks, strokes and other fatal conditions

More often than not, patients and even nurses and doctors are skipping steps that help paint an accurate portrait of someone's blood pressure - how someone sits and positions their arm, whether they just had a cup of joe or chitchat with their practitioner during the measurement, and other factors can produce readings that are higher or lower than normal blood pressure.

"To really make a dent at improving people's cardiovascular health, we need to screen and treat people for hypertension, but we need to do it correctly," Tammy Brady, a paediatric nephrologist at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore who studies blood-pressure measurement and cardiovascular health in children and adults, told The Wall Street Journal.

"Getting the right reading is important for preventing heart attacks, strokes and other potentially fatal conditions," noted the newspaper, Xinhua news agency reported.