ADDENDUM

The Spiegel Online (http://www.spiegel.de/international/) by Philip Bethge on May 5, 2012, was titled “A Future of Self-Surveillance? Tech Pioneers Track Bodily Functions Day and Night.” Accordingly, the authors of the foregoing article (Halberg et al) trust that those concerned with self-tracking will include the self-surveillance of blood pressure and heart rate, analyzed chronobiologically in repeated passes over the accumulating data at systematically selected times during their entire lifespans. In this endeavor, they can focus on vascular variability disorders as a first step. Thereby, one immediately gauges undue loads (ie, strain) and is informed as to their associations that can provide clues for stress relief; one also detects changes in the risk of severe disease and disease-related events, such as stroke (within 6 years, from <5% to near 100%, in one cited study); those treated for high blood pressure will not fly blind to risks induced by the medication (Figure A) that cannot be detected by office visits.