A latest study has revealed that thousands of patients are wrongly diagnosed with high blood pressure as they get anxious when they go to their GP and give high readings at surgeries.

Calling it hypertension, experts believe that it may affect a third of patients who appear not to be responding to drugs for high blood pressure.

To come to this conclusion, researchers monitored the blood pressure of more than 70,000 patients with hypertension and they found that 37% of the patients have turned out to have white coat syndrome.

Following the process of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, patients were asked to wear a portable device that takes blood pressure readings every 20 minutes day and night.

Dr. Alejandro de la Sierra, from the University of Barcelona in Spain who led the study, said, “Physicians should be encouraged to use ambulatory monitoring to confirm resistant hypertension in their patients as it would ensure the most effective treatment options are used. Patients benefit by knowing whether their blood pressure is normal during daily activities or not”.

This study was published in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension and after comparing this white coat syndrome between males and females, the researchers found that more women were affected by it than men.