Key new recommendations include the following:
Diagnosis of primary hypertension should be confirmed using 24–hour ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, or home blood pressure monitoring, rather than be based solely on measurements of blood pressure taken in the clinic. This is to reduce the occurrence of white coat hypertension, which recent studies have suggested is causing the misdiagnosis of hypertension in up to a quarter of the 12 million patients currently labeled with the condition.
For the treatment of hypertension, the guideline now recommends that calcium channel blockers (CCBs) should be the first choice of agent used in patien
