OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to evaluate the incidence and risk of cardiotoxicity induced by sunitinib for patients with renal cell carcinoma. METHODS: This was a population-based case–control study that analyzed data obtained from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database between 1 January 2000 and 31 December 2010. All patients with renal cell carcinoma treated with sunitinib for the first time were included as the study cohort. Cases were identified as subjects, who were aged ³a18 years and had a first-time diagnosis of cardiovascular events induced by sunitinib in outpatient and inpatient settings, and matched to randomly selected controls by age, sex, and index date. Hazard ratios (HRs) were used to quantify the risk of cardiovascular events by conditional logistic regression.  RESULTS: Overall, 187 patients with the diagnosis of Renal Cell Carcinoma (RCC)were retrieved from the database. A total of 17 patients treated with sunitinib as a case group and 170 patients did not treated with sunitinib as a control group. We found no significant difference in incidence of cardiotoxicity between the sunitinib cases and controls in the variables of diabetes, dyslipidemia and chronic periodontiti during 4-years follow-up. However the crude (HR=3.71, 95% CI:1.30-10.5)and adjusted hazard ratio analysis (HR= 4.19 , 95% CI:1.28-13.72) showed a statistical significant risk of hypertensive disease associated with sunitinib. CONCLUSIONS: Treatment with sunitinib for RCC may lead to hypertensive disease in Chinese population. For other cardiotoxicity, we need further analysis by using this large claim database beyond 2010.