Tag: hypercoagulability

Kuopio Stroke Symposium

~ BS
Kuopio in summer

Every year there is a Neurology symposium organized in the quiet and beautiful town of Kuopio in Finland. Every three years, just like this year, the topic is stroke and for that reason, I was invited to be part of the faculty. A true honor, especially if you consider the other speakers on the program who all delivered excellent talks!

But these symposia are much more than just the hard cold science and prestige. It is also about making new friends and reconnecting with old ones. Leave that up to the Fins, whose decision to get us all on a boat and later in a sauna after a long day in the lecture hall proved to be a stroke of genius.

So, it was not for nothing that many of the talks boiled down to the idea that the best science is done with friends – in a team. This is true for when you are running a complex international stroke rehabilitation RCT, or you are investigating whether the lower risk in CVD morbidity and mortality amongst frequent sauna visitors. Or, in my case, about the role of hypercoagulability in young stroke – pdf of my slides can be found here –

New articles published: hypercoagulability and the risk of ischaemic stroke and myocardial infarction

~ BS

Ischaemic stroke + myocardial infarction = arterial thrombosis. Are these two diseases just two sides of the side coin? Well, most if the research I did in the last couple of years tell a different story: most times,hypercoagulability has a stronger impact on the risk of ischaemic stroke at least when compared to myocardial infarction. And when in some cases this was not the case, at least it as clear that the impact was differential. But these papers I published were all single data dots, so we needed to provide an overview of all these data points to get the whole picture. And we did so by publishing two papers, one in the JTH and one in PLOS ONE.

The first paper is a general discussion of the results from the RATIO study, basically an adaptation from my discussion chapter of my thesis (yes it took some time to get to the point of publication, but that’s a whole different story), with a more in-depth discussion to what extent we can draw conclusions from these data. We tried to fill in the caveats (limited number of markers, only young women, only case-control, basically single study) of the first study with our second publication. Here we did the same trick, but in a systematic review.This way, our results have more external validity, while we ensured the internal validity by only including studies that studied both diseases and thus ruling out large biases due to differences in study design. I love these two publications!

You can find these publications through their PMID 26178535 and 26178535, or via my mendeley account.

PS the JTH paper has PAFs in them. Cool!