You may have learned the simple rule that healthy blood pressure is “under 120/80 mm Hg,” but pediatric blood pressure is far more nuanced. Clinicians and researchers rely on pediatric blood pressure percentiles (BPPs) to diagnose conditions such as hypertension and shock, yet existing percentile charts can be hard to access, inconsistent or incomplete.
To address these challenges, researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz (CU Anschutz) developed pedbp, a set of tools designed to standardize and clarify pediatric blood pressure percentiles using key variables like age, sex and height. Leading the effort is Peter DeWitt, PhD, assistant research professor of biomedical informatics.
The pedbp shinyapp is a user-friendly implementation of the pedbp package that is formatted as a web application. This tool allows clinicians, researchers or anyone else to explore blood pressure percentiles without needing to write code or download software. Read on to see how to use the pedbp shinyapp to map and visualize pediatric blood pressure percentiles.
This is an instructional installment highlighting an application of the pedbp tool for pediatric blood pressure. This is part of our ongoing series spotlighting the DBMI Wall of Software, an interactive online hub showcasing the latest open-source software and data tools for researchers. View the Wall of Software here.
To learn more about pedbp and its applications, we sat down with DeWitt.