The blood pressure (BP) is the force generated by the heart that drives circulation of the blood. After Scipione Riva-Rocci first introduced the sphygmomanometer at the beginning of last century, for decades arterial hypertension (hypertension) was considered to be “essential” for securing the perfusion of vital organs, as the brain, heart, and kidney. The term “essentielle hypertonie,” coined by the German clinicians, was indeed meant to underline the fact that BP, alongside the heart beat, is the essence of life, as there can be no life without BP. This led to contend that the higher the BP values, the better for vital organs perfusion, a view testified by Paul Dudley White’s, one of the top cardiologists of the last century, statement: “Hypertension may be an important compensatory mechanism, which should not be tampered with, even were it certain we could control it.” It took the randomized clinical trials in the eighties of the last century to dismantle this misconception, and finally prove that lowering BP was beneficial, e.g., better than placebo for lowering cardiovascular events (1–3). Hypertensiologists should indeed be proud of the fact that antihypertensive treatment has been the first cardiovascular therapy whose efficacy has been proven beyond doubts with randomized clinical trials and use of hard end points. Several decades of epidemiological and experimental research, along with a number of further large-scale clinical trials [reviewed in Ref. (4–6)], have now led the widely accepted concept that hypertension is the “number one” cardiovascular risk factor, not only because of its very high prevalence but also for its tight relationship with cerebro- and cardiovascular events. In westernized countries around 40% of the adult men and women have hypertension, which puts them at an excess risk of stroke, both hemorrhagic and ischemic, acute coronary syndromes, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease with the ensuing need for renal replacement therapy. Considering that worldwide about 13.5% of premature deaths were attributed to hypertension in 2001, the World Health Organization defined hypertension “a humanitarian tragedy on a planetary scale” (7, 8).