Introduction:

Blood pressure recording is one of the most commonly nursing activities carried out in military units. Military personnel practice physical exercise every day. A manual aneroid sphygmomanometer and an automatic device are used for recording blood pressure in the military unit object of this study.

Objective:

To determine the existence of concordance between both apparatus in two different cases, before and after a physical exercise.

Material and method:

The quasi-experimental before and after study was applied to a sample of 98 individuals. A single observer recorded the blood pressure of all the subjects using both sphygmomanometers, before and after having done 30 squats. The used software was the SPSS v.19.0.0.

Results:

The Kolmogorov-Smirnov test was used to check the normality of the distributions. The Pearson correlation coefficient was calculated, showing a positive correlation. The paired Student’s t test was applied to the distributions obtained with both sphygmomanometers, not getting a difference equal to zero between the averages. The Bland Altman method also confirmed clinically relevant differences.

Conclusions:

We cannot consider that the two sphygmomanometers are equivalent in both study situations. The automatic device can be used as long as the blood pressure values are inside the typical limits, but it would be advisable to perform a second control with the manual sphygmomanometer in those cases in which we get higher values than normal with digital equipment.