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Background: While arterial stiffening is a known risk factor for cardiovascular diseases, it remains unclear whether there is an early vascular aging (EVA) in patients who have experienced acute ischemic stroke (AIS). This systematic review and meta-analysis aims to investigate whether patients with AIS exhibit EVA through pulse wave velocity (PWV) measurements shortly after the stroke onset, shedding light on the relationship between arterial stiffness, hypertension, and stroke., Methods: Thirteen case-control studies were included, comparing PWV measurements between AIS patients and non-AIS individuals. A meta-analysis was performed to compare PWV levels, age, blood pressure, and the prevalence of different cardiovascular risk factors among 1711 AIS patients and 1551 controls., Results: Despite AIS patients showing higher PWV compared to controls (mean difference: 1.72 m/s, 95 % CI: 1.05-2.38, p < 0.001; I 2 = 88.3 %), their age did not significantly differ (95 % CI: -0.47-0.94, p = 0.519; I 2 = 0 %), suggesting EVA in AIS patients. Moreover, AIS patients exhibited elevated systolic and diastolic blood pressure and had higher odds of smoking, hypertension, diabetes, and male gender compared to controls., Conclusions: This study's findings underscore the presence of EVA in AIS patients, evident through increased PWV measurements shortly after stroke onset. Notably, smoking, hypertension, and diabetes mellitus emerge as substantial factors contributing to accelerated arterial stiffness within this population., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background Stratification of cardiovascular risk in patients with ischemic stroke is important as it may inform management strategies. We aimed to develop a machine-learning-derived prognostic model for the prediction of cardiovascular risk in ischemic stroke patients., Materials and Methods: Two prospective stroke registries with consecutive acute ischemic stroke patients were used as training/validation and test datasets. The outcome assessed was major adverse cardiovascular event, defined as non-fatal stroke, non-fatal myocardial infarction, and cardiovascular death during 2-year follow-up. The variables selection was performed with the LASSO technique. The algorithms XGBoost (Extreme Gradient Boosting), Random Forest and Support Vector Machines were selected according to their performance. The evaluation of the classifier was performed by bootstrapping the dataset 1000 times and performing cross-validation by splitting in 60% for the training samples and 40% for the validation samples., Results: The model included age, gender, atrial fibrillation, heart failure, peripheral artery disease, arterial hypertension, statin treatment before stroke onset, prior anticoagulant treatment (in case of atrial fibrillation), creatinine, cervical artery stenosis, anticoagulant treatment at discharge (in case of atrial fibrillation), and statin treatment at discharge. The best accuracy was measured by the XGBoost classifier. In the validation dataset, the area under the curve was 0.648 (95%CI:0.619-0.675) and the balanced accuracy was 0.58 ± 0.14. In the test dataset, the corresponding values were 0.59 and 0.576., Conclusions: We propose an externally validated machine-learning-derived model which includes readily available parameters and can be used for the estimation of cardiovascular risk in ischemic stroke patients., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Carotid atherosclerosis and likely pathogenic patent foramen ovale (PFO) are two potential embolic sources in patients with embolic stroke of undetermined source (ESUS). The relationship between these two mechanisms among ESUS patients remains unclear., Aim: To investigate the relation between carotid atherosclerosis and likely pathogenic PFO in patients with ESUS. We hypothesized that ipsilateral carotid atherosclerotic plaques are less prevalent in ESUS with likely pathogenic PFO compared to patients with likely incidental PFO or without PFO., Methods: The presence of PFO was assessed with transthoracic echocardiography with microbubble test and, when deemed necessary, through trans-oesophageal echocardiography. The presence of PFO was considered as likely incidental if the RoPE (Risk of Paradoxical Embolism) score was 0-6 and likely pathogenic if 7-10., Results: Among 374 ESUS patients (median age: 61years, 40.4% women), there were 63 (49.6%) with likely incidental PFO, 64 (50.4%) with likely pathogenic PFO and 165 (44.1%) with ipsilateral carotid atherosclerosis. The prevalence of ipsilateral carotid atherosclerosis was lower in patients with likely pathogenic PFO (7.8%) compared to patients with likely incidental PFO (46.0%) or patients without PFO (53.0%) (p<0.001). After adjustment for multiple confounders, the prevalence of ipsilateral carotid atherosclerosis remained lower in patients with likely pathogenic PFO compared to patients with likely incidental PFO or without PFO (adjusted OR=0.32, 95%CI:0.104-0.994, p=0.049)., Conclusions: The presence of carotid atherosclerosis is inversely related to the presence of likely pathogenic PFO in patients with ESUS., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background and Aim: Rapid and sensitive detection of atrial fibrillation (AF) is of paramount importance for initiation of adequate preventive therapy after stroke. Stroke Unit care includes continuous electrocardiogram monitoring (CEM) but the optimal exploitation of the recorded ECG traces is controversial. In this retrospective single-center study, we investigated whether an automated analysis of continuous electrocardiogram monitoring (ACEM), based on a software algorithm, accelerates the detection of AF in patients admitted to our Stroke Unit compared to the routine CEM., Methods: Patients with acute ischemic stroke or transient ischemic attack were consecutively enrolled. After a 12-channel ECG on admission, all patients received CEM. Additionally, in the second phase of the study the CEM traces of the patients underwent ACEM analysis using a software algorithm for AF detection. Patients with history of AF or with AF on the admission ECG were excluded., Results: The CEM (n = 208) and ACEM cohorts (n= 114) did not differ significantly regarding risk factors, duration of monitoring and length of admission. We found a higher rate of newly-detected AF in the ACEM cohort compared to the CEM cohort (15.8% versus 10.1%, P < .001). Median time to first detection of AF was shorter in the ACEM compared to the CEM cohort [10 hours (IQR 0-23) versus 46.50 hours (IQR 0-108.25), P < .001]., Conclusions: ACEM accelerates the detection of AF in patients with stroke compared with the routine CEM. Further evidences are required to confirm the increased rate of AF detected using ACEM., (Crown Copyright © 2020. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Controversial evidence suggests that right insular stroke may be associated with worse outcomes compared to the left insular ischemic lesion., Objectives: We investigated whether lateralization of insular stroke is associated with early and late outcome in terms of in-hospital complications, stroke recurrence, cardiovascular events, and death., Methods: Data were prospectively collected from the Athens Stroke Registry. Insular cortex involvement was identified based on brain CT scans or MRI images. Patients were followed up prospectively at 1, 3, 6 months after hospital discharge and yearly thereafter up to 5-years or until death. The assessed outcomes were in-hospital complications, functional outcome assessed by the modified Rankin Scale, stroke recurrence, cardiovascular events, and death. Cox-regression analysis was performed to estimate the cumulative probability of each outcome according to the lateralization of insular strokes., Results: Among the 1212 patients, 650 had left insular stroke involvement and 562 had right. New onset of in-hospital atrial fibrillation was similar between right and left insular strokes (11.6% versus 12.9%, P = .484). During the 5-year follow-up sudden death occurred in 21 (3.7%) patients with right insular compared to 30 (4.6%) with left insular stroke (P = .476). There was no difference between left and right insular strokes regarding mortality (adjusted odds ratio [OR]: .92, 95% confidence interval [CI]: .80-1.06), stroke recurrence (4.3% versus 4.9%; adjusted OR: .81 95% CI: .58-1.13), cardiovascular events, and sudden death (adjusted OR: .99, 95% CI: .76-1.29) and on death and dependency (adjusted OR: .88, 95% CI: .75-1.02) during a 5-year follow up., Conclusions: Lateralization of insular ischemic stroke involvement is not associated with stroke outcomes., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Stratification of overall vascular risk in patients with ischemic stroke is important as it may guide management decisions. Currently available schemes have only modest prognostic accuracy. The TRA2°P score aids in vascular risk stratification in patients with previous myocardial infarction (MI)., Aim: We investigated whether the prognostic performance of TRA2°P can be extended in patients with ischemic stroke and whether it can improve the risk stratification made by CHA 2 DS 2 VASc and Essen-Stroke-Risk-Score (ESRS)., Methods: We analyzed the Athens Stroke Registry using Kaplan-Meier survival and Cox-regression analyses to assess if TRA2°P (in different categorizations) predicts the composite endpoint of stroke recurrence, MI or cardiovascular death. We compared its incremental predictive value over CHA 2 DS 2 -VASc and ESRS and calculated continuous net reclassification indices (cNRI)., Results: In 2833 patients (followed for 9278 patient-years) and 776 events, there was decreased survival probability for TRA2°P-based high-risk patients compared to low-risk (log-rank-test P < .001), but the discriminatory power for the occurrence of the composite endpoint was only modest (Harrell's-C:.566, 95% CI:.545-.587). Combined with ESRS, TRA2°P conferred incremental discrimination (Harrell's-C:.544, 95% CI:.513-.574 versus .574, 95% CI:.543-.605 respectively, P = .049) and reclassification value (cNRI = 9.8%, P = .02). Combined with CHA 2 DS 2 -VASc, TRA2°P did not improve discrimination (Harell's-C:.578, 95% CI: .547-.608 versus .585, 95% CI:.554-.616, P = .738)., Conclusion: The currently available prognostic scores have generally low performance to predict the overall cardiovascular risk in ischemic stroke patients. Further research is needed to improve vascular risk stratification in ischemic stroke patients., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Background: Outcomes are worse in patients who underwent thrombolysis for acute ischemic stroke (AIS) with persistent hypertension. The objective of this study is to investigate whether fall in systolic blood pressure (SBP) has any relationship with neurological outcome 24 hours after thrombolysis, after adjusting for potentially confounding factors., Methods: Retrospective analysis of a single-center database of consecutive thrombolysis cases for AIS. Multivariate regression analysis was used to explore the relationship between fall in SBP and reduction in National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score 24 hours after thrombolysis. Other potentially confounding predictor variables used in the model were SBP on thrombolysis, blood glucose level on thrombolysis, NIHSS score on thrombolysis, administration of antihypertensive medications, and the time to thrombolysis after symptom onset., Results: A fall in SBP 24 hours after thrombolysis is independently associated with greater improvement in NIHSS score 24 hours after thrombolysis (coefficient .051, 95% confidence interval .023-.078, P < .001). Thus, a reduction of 10 mmHg in SBP after 24 hours is associated with a .51 point reduction in the NIHSS score., Conclusions: Restoration of SBP toward normal limits after thrombolysis for AIS is associated with greater early neurological improvement., (Copyright © 2016 National Stroke Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)