FDA employee: Angiotensin receptor blockers should have cancer warning FDA employee: Angiotensin receptor blockers should have cancer warning. UPI Photo/Brian Kersey BETHESDA, Md., May 31 (UPI) -- A senior regulator says he is at odds with his employer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, over cancer warnings for a class of blood-pressure drugs. Thomas A. Marciniak, a senior employee at the FDA, said he is seeking stronger warnings about the drugs -- taken by millions and generating $7.6 billion in U.S. sales in 2012 -- known as angiotensin receptor blockers, or ARBs, because they might be linked to higher cancer rates, The Wall Street Journal reported after examining internal FDA documents. Ellis Unger, chief of the drug-evaluation division that includes Marciniak, called his complaints a "diversion." "We have no reason to tell the public anything new," he said in an interview. The drugs are taken daily by patients to prevent heart attack, stroke and heart failure. A study published in Lancet Oncology in 2010 conducted by Ilke Sipahi and colleagues at University Hospitals in Cleveland analyzed five studies involving 68,402 patients. They found that people taking the drugs had an 11 percent greater risk of new cancer overall and a 25 percent greater risk of new lung cancer, compared with those who didn't take the blood pressure medication. However, a year later, the FDA said its own analysis found "no increase in risk" from taking the medication as did Europe's drug regulator, the Journal said. However, in the FDA analysis, the FDA combined different studies to look at more patients, multiplying its statistical power to find possible side effects from the drugs, a technique called meta-analysis. If the original studies has flaws, the meta-analyses could compound the problem, researchers said. Marciniak said that's what happened during the FDA analysis and he warned others in the agency that taking results tabulated by companies was likely to produce unreliable results: "Garbage in, garbage out," he wrote.