Blood Pressure Lowering and Risk of Cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Pharmacologic blood pressure (BP) lowering is typically a lifelong treatment, and both clinicians and patients may have concerns about the long-term use of antihypertensive agents and the risk for cancer. However, evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) regarding the effect of long-term pharmacologic BP lowering on the risk for new-onset cancer is limited, with most knowledge derived from observational studies. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to assess whether long-term BP lowering affects the risk for new-onset cancer, cause-specific cancer death, and selected site-specific cancers. METHODS: Individual-level data from 42 RCTs were pooled using a one-stage individual participant data meta-analysis. The primary outcome was incident cancer of all types, and secondary outcomes were cause-specific cancer death and selected site-specific cancers. Prespecified subgroup analyses were conducted to assess the heterogeneity of the BP-lowering effect by baseline variables and over follow-up time. Cox proportional hazards regression, stratified by trial, was used for the statistical analysis. For site-specific cancers, analyses were complemented with Mendelian randomization, using naturally randomized genetic variants associated with BP lowering to mimic the design of a long-term RCT. RESULTS: Data from 314,016 randomly allocated participants without known cancer at baseline were analyzed. Over a median follow-up of 4 years (Q1-Q3: 3-5 years), 17,954 participants (5.7%) developed cancer, and 4,878 (1.5%) died of cancer. In the individual participant data meta-analysis, no associations were found between reductions in systolic or diastolic BP and cancer risk (HR per 5 mm Hg reduction in systolic BP: 1.03 [95% CI: 0.99-1.06]; HR per 3 mm Hg reduction in diastolic BP: 1.03 [95% CI: 0.98-1.07]). No changes in relative risk for incident cancer were observed over follow-up time, nor was there evidence of heterogeneity in treatment effects across baseline subgroups. No effect on cause-specific cancer death was found. For site-specific cancers, no evidence of an effect was observed, except a possible link with lung cancer risk (HR for systolic BP reduction: 1.17; 99.5% CI: 1.02-1.32). Mendelian randomization studies showed no association between systolic or diastolic BP reduction and site-specific cancers, including overall lung cancer and its subtypes. CONCLUSIONS: Randomized data analysis provided no evidence to indicate that pharmacologic BP lowering has a substantial impact, either increasing or decreasing, on the risk for incident cancer, cause-specific cancer death, or selected site-specific cancers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".