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DW-TV: And with us in the studio to talk about what other steps medicine is making in the area of circulatory and cardiac disease is Professor Detlev Ganten, the former CEO of the Charité hospital here in Berlin, and an expert on hypertension. Now we know that about one billion people in this world suffer from high blood pressure and the numbers are even rising. We definitely need a solution. Will it maybe come from systems like we see in this report?

Detlev Ganten: This patient was definitely lucky to be in Hanover and to have this high-tech treatment. But of course we cannot treat one billion people or more with this type of high-tech device. So we will have to think of something else. And fortunately we do have very effective drugs and of course we can also treat hypertension, especially mild hypertension, without drugs - just by better nutrition, healthier nutrition, less salt, more physical exercise, less obesity and so on.

Bildunterschrift:

What's actually going wrong in this world that so many people suffer from hypertension?

What's going wrong? Our heritage of course is as long as life as life has started. 3.5 million years agowe carry this in our genes civilization is going much faster than evolution. So our bodies lives in a civilization in an environment which is not suirted to our biology. This is why we have so-called 'civilization diseases' like cardio-vascular disease, but also others.

We sit too much in offices and and

...and TV studios, correct, and we're eating too much, we are drinking too much. We are not walking enough, not working hard enough, we are not sweating any more - so that's our problem.

Lately here in Berlin the World Health Summit took place. You were actually the president of the event . There were many Nobel Prize winners taking part. One of the topics was the future of medicine - individualized medicine. Is there maybe hope for new treatments in this field - also for high blood pressure?

Definitely. The scientific progress is enormous and we can now sequence the genome for less than one thousand dollars, so everybody eventually could get his own genome sequence analyzed. And we can read from the analysis risk factors, genetic risk factors. But this is not the solution to [high] blood pressure. Personalized medicine means genome sequencing - yes, in the future, but that also means personal responsibility: prevention, know your risk as precisely as possible, but do whatever you can without spending too much money and staying natural in a way, and looking for natural ways of combatting disease.But even if you do everything correctly and you live in a good way, you might still get high blood pressure. So, with this personalized medicine, what would actually change if you go to a doctor? If you see a doctor what would he do?

The doctor has more information. The doctor can consult you better with this information. But a good doctor will always first ask the patient 'what can you do yourself to combat hypertension, to defeat your disease yourself. 'And - you know - one of the sayings and, I think, great words at the congress was 'education is the best kind of vaccination against disease.'

Interview: Ingolf Baur