- Hypertension is a problem for millions of people around the world. So millions of people had been treated with various antihypertensive drugs. Of course, every medication has side effects, and every drug has risks. Some of the antihypertensive drugs have increased or relatively increased risks of certain cancers. There are also some other side effects [of anti-hypertensive medications]. Could you discuss potential side effects of hypertension treatments? There are some side effects that we know of. Let's say patients who were treated with diuretic are at risk to develop diabetes, the same is with beta blocker, because it lowers the HDL, the good cholesterol, it increases the LDL and the triglycerides. So you have some imbalance of metabolic parameters. Calcium antagonists can cause leg edema, gingival hypertrophy, some abdominal pain. So hypertension drugs have a lot of side effects, most of the side effects you feel and when you feel the side effects, you can decide if you should stop the hypertension medication. Diuretics also can cause hyponatremia [low blood sodium], which is very dangerous, and this is mainly because patients who are getting diuretic - I don't know why - they drink a lot of water and when they drink a lot, they develop hyponatremia. Now we give instructions to patients who are on a diuretic, "Don't drink too much!" and if they keep our a suggestion, they don't develop side effects. There are some side effects that you cannot really appreciate - this is a risk of cancer. Now we believe - this is one of the studies that we did many years ago - we found a correlation, or association, between hypertension itself and cancer - so we believe that hypertensive patients, and especially if they are diabetic, they have higher risk to develop cancer. Whether the medications are the cause of cancer or not is a big discussion, it's a controversy. But we believe also that if someone lives longer, he will finally develop cancer. So the question is not if hypertension medications cause cancer - if you live 80 years instead of 60 years - in the last 20 years you may develop cancer. So that's the question - whether this is because of the drug or because you live longer. I mean, it's not a very strong evidence that anti-hypertensive medications cause cancer - we found an association between thiazide diuretic and kidney tumors. Again, when you weigh the benefit, advantage vs. disadvantage - you increase the risk to develop cancer by 1% and you decrease the risk of stroke by 40 - 50 % What would you do? Take the medications or not? And answer is you would take hypertension treatment drugs, even though there is a possibility that anti-hypertension medications increase a little bit the risk of cancer. Of course, hypertension by itself increases the risk of cancer, but we still want to lower the blood pressure and to prevent heart disease. Is there anything known about how hypertension might increase the risks of cancers? It's a philosophy, it's very complicated mechanism that has been suggested, it's not proven, but it is epidemiological observation that there is more cancer among hypertensive patients.

- Probably could be connected to the relatively higher rates of obesity and metabolic syndrome?

- That's it! It's very difficult to isolate high blood pressure from other risk factors!