The minimum cuff pressure needed to fully stop arterial blood flow into a limb.
Limb occlusion pressure (LOP) is the individually determined cuff pressure needed to completely stop arterial blood flow into a specific limb at a specific point in time. It is limb-specific and person-specific rather than a generic number, because it depends on that person's limb circumference and tissue composition on the day of measurement.
BFR training and rehabilitation dosing is prescribed as a percentage of LOP, so an accurate LOP reading directly determines how much occlusion a patient actually receives at the cuff pressure you select. Using a fixed absolute pressure across patients, or across the same patient's changing limb size, risks under- or over-occluding relative to what was intended, which changes both the training stimulus and the safety margin.
LOP is typically measured with a pneumatic cuff and a Doppler ultrasound probe distal to the cuff, inflating until the arterial pulse signal disappears, before then setting training or occlusion pressure at a chosen percentage of that value (commonly in the 40-80% range). This measurement is usually repeated per session, or at minimum whenever cuff, limb position, or patient status changes, since LOP is not assumed to be stable over time.
LOP values are protocol-specific: the cuff width and material, the detection method (Doppler versus other techniques), and limb position can all alter the measured figure, so values are not interchangeable across different equipment or protocols. A common misuse is treating a single LOP measurement, or a generic percentage-of-LOP figure from the literature, as a fixed constant for a patient rather than re-measuring and applying it within the specific protocol it came from.
This guide was auto-drafted and is pending editorial review.