Blood pressure mesurement in the anglosaxon world

Just a question: how do Doctors mesure your blood presure in Anglosaxon countries. Dothey use the metric system ? If my blood presure is 12/7 in Europe, that will it be for an American doctor ?

In Switzerland the doctor would say: 120/70.

I never heard of anyone using centimeters of mercury.

It was always millimeters of mercury.

Centimeters of mercury are often used in France.

The only other unit of measure I've heard of with regards to BP is kPa, kilopascals. A few monitors I've seen are capable of displaying in kPa in addition to mmHg as the LCD display has those characters embedded. A BP of 120/80mmHg would be 16/11 kPa, so 12/7 kPa would be 90/52 mmHg. I suspect it's possibly more commonly used in Germany or other parts of Europe, perhaps some of the European folk on here can answer how common kPa is?

Regarding centimetres of mercury I came across the article linked below which suggests 'centimetres of blood' could be a useful unit of measure as it gives patients a more meaningful concept of BP and high BP and thus more of an incentive to keep theirs under control.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(00)04613-4/fulltext

If they are going to change the units, they should just go to kPa and be done with it.

Someone has to bite the bullet making the change. I wouldn't mind if it was our generation. I like metric better anyway.

What I don't like from what I have seen in a couple of previous posts is that there are only two significant digits involved as posted here, and especially when the digits range from say, 6 to 20, only having two digits doesn't make me happy.

Yes, the rounding to single digits bothers me a bit too although any monitor I've seen capable of displaying in kPa does it to one decimal place. So in theory a finer resolution is possible as each 0.1 step is less than 1 mmHg, i.e 0.75 mmHg. But then the actual machine would still be subject to the common +/-3 mmHg or 2% accuracy criteria which renders that a bit moot.

I haven't really thought about how I would feel about a change in units, mmHg is all I've ever used. The article I linked to in my previous post was from 2001. Not being in the medical profession (but a keen amateur) I don't know if it's something that's being considered. Like any proposal of change, I'm sure resistance is almost guaranteed. 😃

2% accuracy on BP is completely OK, actually pretty good.