White coat hypertension: concept and epidemiological and clinical meaning

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mental and emotional stress have become part of everyone´s life nowadays. However, this may overload the sympathetic nervous system leading to higher levels of blood pressure. Situations that seem to pose low levels of stress as a visit to one´s physician, for example, may result in an event known as the White Coat Hypertension (WCH). Events like these may increase the secretion of adrenaline causing neurogenical blood constriction as well as facilitating the release of norepinephrine into the blood stream resulting in high blood pressure. In spite of not being so intense as in essential hypertension, the WCH sympathetic overactivity should not be regarded as an intermediary event between normotension and sustained hypertension.