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Piesbergen, Christoph; Kircher, Katharina and Weber, Reinhard (2008): Adjuvante Therapie von arterieller Hypertonie durch hochfrequentes Blutdruckbiofeedback. In: Verhaltenstherapie, No. 2: pp. 83-90 [PDF, 318kB]

Abstract

Introduction: A lack of studies on the effects of continuous blood pressure biofeedback led to the development of a screening and feedback software allowing for a `beat-to-beat' representation of arterial blood pressure. Through this method patients find that they can exert some control of their blood pressure. Patients and Methods: For evaluation purposes a pilot study was conducted with 84 hypertensive patients at the Klinik Hohenried, Germany. Two experimental groups which received the normal treatment program of the hospital and an additional 2 (20 patients) or 3-6 (22 patients) biofeedback sessions, respectively, were compared with one control group treated additionally with pseudo biofeedback (20 patients) and another control group (22 patients) which underwent the clinic program without biofeedback. Results: Both experimental groups yielded significantly more markedly blood pressure reductions (MAP) than the controls (p = 0.001), but patients who received 3-6 feedback sessions did not perform significantly better than patients who received only 2 sessions (p = 0.517). Conclusions: 2 sessions of feedback treatment can already have clinically relevant effects. This suggests a major influence of cognitive processes such as self-effectiveness and self-control.

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