Hypertension diagnosis and therapy using pressure sensor

A method comprising:

• sensing a pulmonary artery pressure (PAP) and providing a sensed PAP signal;
• determining an abnormal blood pressure (BP) condition using information from the sensed PAP signal including:
• determining a sleep interval using at least one of (1) time-of-day information or (2) patient status information indicating whether the patient is sleeping;
• determining a sleep BP using information from at least a portion of the sensed PAP signal during the sleep interval;
• determining a non-sleep BP using information from at least a portion of the sensed PAP signal outside of the sleep interval;
• and
• determining a differential indication of non-sleep vs. sleep hypertension by comparing information about the sleep BP to information about the non-sleep BP;
• delivering pacing energy to a heart;
• and
• automatically altering at least one pacing characteristic in response to the detected abnormal BP condition.

A system comprising:

• an implantable pulmonary artery (PA) pressure sensor configured to sense a pulmonary artery pressure (PAP) of a PA of a subject and to provide a sensed PAP signal;
• a PAP signal conditioning circuit configured to condition the sensed PAP signal into a conditioned PAP signal for acoustic transmission;
• a communication circuit including an ultrasonic transducer configured to acoustically transmit the conditioned PAP signal to an implantable pulse generator (PG);
• an external diagnostic circuit including a radio frequency (RF) communication circuit configured to receive the conditioned PAP signal from the implantable PG, wherein the external diagnostic circuit is configured to detect an abnormal blood pressure (BP) condition including a differential indication of non-sleep vs. sleep hypertension using:
• a determination of a sleep interval using at least one of (1) time-of-day information or (2) patient status information indicating whether the patient is sleeping;
• information from at least a portion of the conditioned PAP signal during the sleep interval, including a sleep BP;
• information from at least a portion of the conditioned PAP signal during the non-sleep interval, including a non-sleep BP;
• and
• a threshold;
• wherein the external diagnostic circuit is configured to detect the differential indication of non-sleep vs. sleep hypertension if the non-sleep BP fails to exceed the sleep BP by at least the threshold;
• and
• wherein the implantable PG includes an ultrasonic transducer configured to receive the conditioned PAP signal from the communication circuit and an RF communication circuit configured to transmit the conditioned PAP signal to the external diagnostic circuit, wherein the implantable PG is configured to deliver a pacing energy to a heart and to automatically alter at least one pacing characteristic in response to the detected abnormal BP condition.