Omron M7

ENTER MR. EVER-SO-SLIGHTLY

…as in “ever so slightly overweight and hypertensive, with a dash of excess cholesterol thrown in”.

I’m not one of those stereotypical males who would rather wait till they’re nearly dead before admitting it to the medical profession, and so when someone offers to give me a ‘MOT’ under the auspices of a London-wide survey of health in various age groups, I didn’t leap at, but I did at least take up, the chance. I’ve already done the colon-cancer sampling – at last, a chance to send someone else some s**t in the post!

Of course, knowing that at least at some point during the process, some legalised vampire was going to be taking several phials of my life-blood, I was a little tense. This did not do much for my blood pressure, or rather it did in a negative way, and so a few weeks later, I got a letter from my GP suggesting that we have a non-urgent chat about the results.

It turns out that I have three things wrong with me, well five if you count being over 60 and male.

1. I’m overweight (only slightly)

1. My cholesterol levels are slightly higher than ideal – actually it turns out they’re below average, but since the UK ‘average’ is now regarded as unhealthy, they were, apparently, a cause for concern.

1. My blood pressure was slightly and consistently above ‘normal’ levels after three readings.

Multiply all three factors together using an undisclosed algorithm on something called The Framingham Index and you get a 20% risk of heart attack/stroke in the next 10 years. Funnily enough, at my age, that sounds pretty ‘normal’ if you ask me! It would appear though that the 20% threshold is the one they’ve chosen to start getting pills down your neck!

Never mind the fact that I’ve never smoked and frequently take strenuous exercise, avoid unnecessary exposure to animal fats, salt and extra sugars. No, my GP seemed determined to ply me with something, ‘statins’ being the ones the smart money was on.

Seeing that I was less than happy with the idea of taking a pill for the rest of my life, a pill, which it would seem, would only reduce my 20% risk to about 17%, I chose to go away promising to lose more weight and to give him a two-week cross-section of my blood pressures free from ‘white coat syndrome’. After all it was probably being overweight which was exacerbating the other two.

The wind was further taken from his sails when he was forced to agree that I’d lost further weight since the medical to a point where, if these had been the results then, they’d never have been flagged up to him.

Nevertheless, I decided to plough on, agreeing to take my blood pressure under less trying circumstances over a two week period. Nodding in all the right places that I’d got a ‘proper monitor’ not the smaller less accurate ‘wrist’ variety, I thought I’d better get one PDQ!

Good ol’ E-Bay to the rescue.

As I said, I’d already got a wrist-cuff BP monitor, which works on the same principle of inflating an air bag around part of your anatomy, in this case the wrist. However, they aren’t quite as accurate as an upper-arm cuff for various reasons, one of which is that it’s harder to leave your arm in a relaxed state with your wrist level with your heart, unless you have a sling and act like you’ve broken your arm.

An upper arm cuff allows you to get your heart level with the cuff just by sitting at a desk and letting the desk take the weight of your relaxed arm.

Four days after checking in to e-bay, I started using my new Omrom M7 Intellisense BP monitor. Being a gadget nerd even when it comes to such items I was keen to check how accurate or otherwise the wrist-cuff version had been. To be fair, its average reading wasn’t too bad, but over a couple of readings, the highs and lows were more widely spread.

I’ve been using the Omron for nearly two weeks now, and it’s been slightly more of a chore to use. For one thing, unless it’s summer you will probably need to remove upper top clothing just to bare your arm. I get over this by taking readings as I get dressed in the morning and as I get ready for bed in the evening. So there I sit in the morning, at the compute,r without a stitch on looking like John Cleese about to announce “And now for something completely different!”

In warmer weather, a short sleeved shirt or t-shirt shouldn’t get in the way in the first place.

UNCOMFORTABLE?

Not really. The extra-large cuff which extends from 22cm to 44cm, can handle a wide range of biceps from Olive Oyl to Bluto (or Bruto depending on how old you are), so getting a comfortable all-touching but not tight fit is easy. The air hose is sufficiently floppy so as not to obstruct the process of getting your arm in a good position.

The motor driving the air compressor is quite quiet, unlike the wrist-cuff version which sounded like a Stuka in a dive.

Of course, in action, the cuff gets pretty tight, but at least you know that this slightly unpleasant sensation is going to go away after about 5-10 seconds, as it releases and calculates the results. When I had my medical, I think it was the tension of knowing that several blood samples were coming next that did the trick for me, the previous experience having hurt like hell*, and pumped up my results. I even have the satisfaction of using something more or less identical to that which my doctor used last on me, whilst getting somewhat lower results, averaging around 121/68 mmHg compared to the 160/85 last week at the doctor’s. It also helps to be an Excel freak, and I have set up a spreadsheet (you didn’t think I wouldn’t did you?) to give an overall average from about 56 readings.

(* Second time around, the legalised vampire, as Tony Hancock would have it, was so skilful that I barely felt a thing. If only I’d known in advance!)

Like all BP monitors, you get three readings, the first two, Systolic and Diastolic, being pressure readings are measure in millimetres of mercury - mmHg (just like a barometer), and the third is a pulse reading. If the machine detects any irregularity in pulse, it aborts the reading, so I’m guessing anyone with ‘arrhythmia’ had better look elsewhere. As I understand it, the Systolic is the ‘pipeline pressure’ peak as the heart pumps, whereas the Diastolic is more like the ‘background pressure’ in between pumps, at least looking at it from an amateur plumber’s point of view, that’s how it seems.

There’s a memory to allow the readings from at least the last few weeks to be stored (90 readings). You access these by scrolling with two keys. It also gives a useful average of the last three readings, which to a certain extent means that I needn’t have put so much detail into the Excel spreadsheet! For example, I’ve been asked to take separate morning and evening readings. If I take them three at a time, with say a minute or two in between, I need only note the averages.

TECHNICAL STUFF

Yes even a BP monitor is worthy of some nerdery!

The unit runs off 4 AA batteries (supplied) or from a 6-volt adapter (not supplied). There’s no need to remove the batteries when using the latter. Batteries are good for about 300 inflations of the cuff.

Accuracy is rated to be within 3 mmHg of the true pressure, surprisingly not a percentage. Therefore, the higher your blood pressure, the more accurate it is, although the pulse rate is rated to be within 5% fully of accurate. Given the wild swings that you can experience when taking the readings at the opposite ends of a day, a few mmHgs between friends hardly matter.

Unlike our hi-tech bathroom scales that measure BMI, body fat and water percentages, there’s no provision to switch between users, so if you do share it, make doubly sure you write down your own readings first!

The whole thing comes in a tough case about the size of a large card index.

CONCLUSIONS

Since these things become more important with advancing age, it makes sense to do your own monitoring without all the tension created by waiting an hour in the surgery waiting room before being called in (that’s the last time I turn up 10 minutes early for an evening appointment!). With some decent scales and the occasional prick on the finger in Boots, I could almost have done as good a job as the clinic doing the medicals!

I consider it 50 quid well-spent, and besides, I was wondering what my next gadget, and therefore, opinion was going to be!