The Reading That Spiked on Thursday Morning and Nobody Noticed the Pattern
Your GP looks at three readings taken in the clinic — one per quarterly appointment — and sees random data. You look at ninety readings logged over four months and see that every Thursday morning measurement is running 12-15 mmHg systolic higher than the same-day evening reading, and higher than any other weekday morning. Thursday mornings: the commute is longer, the first meeting is at 8:30, the coffee starts earlier.
White coat hypertension is well-documented. Thursday morning hypertension, driven by a specific weekly schedule pattern, is only visible in ninety readings with day-of-week labeling. This template captures the context that makes pattern recognition possible.
Systolisch, Diastolisch, Pulsfrequenz: The Three Numbers Behind Each Reading
Systolic (Systolisch) is the upper number — peak arterial pressure at heart contraction. Diastolic (Diastolisch) is the lower number — arterial pressure between beats. Pulse (Pulsfrequenz) is the heart rate at time of measurement. All three are integers, all three are measured simultaneously with a modern automatic cuff, and all three matter for different reasons.
Isolated systolic hypertension — elevated systolic with normal diastolic — is the dominant form in adults over 65 and carries different clinical weight than combined systolic-diastolic elevation. Pulse pressure, the difference between systolic and diastolic values, is a derived marker: a widening pulse pressure trend over months of logged data is a clinical signal that systolic hypertension alone doesn't capture. Pulsfrequenz adds the rate variable: a reading of 148/92 with a pulse of 88 is a different clinical picture than 148/92 with a pulse of 112, particularly if the elevated pulse correlates with elevated systolic across multiple records.
Datum, Uhrzeit, Wochentag: The Three Contextual Fields
Date, exact time, and day of the week together answer the question that three quarterly clinic readings never can: when during the day and week does pressure peak, and when is it lowest?
Blood pressure follows a circadian rhythm — typically lowest during sleep, rising sharply in the morning hours (the "morning surge"), with a second smaller peak in the afternoon, and gradual decline toward bedtime. The morning surge period is the highest-risk window for cardiovascular events in hypertensive patients. Logging a morning reading and an evening reading with exact times captures whether morning surge is occurring and whether evening readings are normalizing — the pattern that determines whether morning hypertension needs medication timing adjustment.
Wochentag (day of week) adds the weekly cycle. Work stress, weekend routine changes, Saturday alcohol, and Sunday inactivity each show predictably in blood pressure data when the day-of-week label is present. Without it, the contextual explanation for the Thursday spike or the Sunday low is invisible.
Gewicht, Größe, BMI: The Weight Variable
Gewicht (weight in kg) and Größe (height in m.cm format) feed the calculated BMI field: weight ÷ height². This calculation is automatic — the BMI column populates as soon as weight and height are entered.
Logging weight alongside blood pressure measurements isn't redundant with a separate weight tracking database. It captures the co-movement: months where weight trends up and blood pressure trends up in parallel make the relationship visible in the same dataset, with the same dates. A 4 kg weight gain between March and June, tracked against BP readings for the same period, either confirms or refutes the hypothesis that the BP increase is weight-driven.
For a patient on an ACE inhibitor or ARB titration protocol, logging weight regularly catches fluid retention — a sign of decompensated heart failure — before it becomes symptomatic. The BP reading alone doesn't flag that; the BP-plus-weight record does.