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The addition of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring to conventional clinic measurement for defining blood pressure status in clinical practice has added a new complexity to the process, because the separation of normotension and hypertension can be assessed independently by each of the 2 methods. We thus have 4 potential groups of patients who are, first, normotensive by both methods (true normotensives); second, hypertensive by both (true, or sustained, hypertensives); third, hypertensive by clinic measurement and normotensive by ambulatory measurement (whitecoat hypertensives); and, fourth, normotensive by clinic measurement and hypertensive by ambulatory measurement. From a clinical point of view, the first 2 groups are easy to deal with, because both methods give the same classification. Of more interest are the groups in which there is disagreement. The third group, usually referred to as …