White Coat Hypertension

White coat hypertension, also called white coat syndrome, is a pattern in which a person's blood pressure reads above the normal range when measured in a clinical setting such as a doctor's office, but not when measured elsewhere, a discrepancy attributed to the anxiety many people feel during a clinic visit. Because this anxiety can produce a clinic reading that overstates a person's everyday blood pressure, clinicians increasingly rely on daytime ambulatory blood pressure monitoring, which captures readings across ordinary daily activity rather than a single anxious moment, to avoid a false diagnosis of hypertension. The mirror-image pattern is called masked hypertension, in which a person's blood pressure is elevated during daily life but reads as normal in the clinic, so that a clinic-only reading in that case would wrongly reassure both patient and physician.