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The Pathogenesis of Lacunar Stroke

Assessing associations in subtypes

The oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) pathway is implicated in the pathogenesis of lacunar stroke, an association specific to patients with the multiple lacunar infarcts/leukoaraiosis (MLI/LA) subtype. This according to a study of 1,012 patients with MRI-confirmed lacunar stroke and 964 age-matched controls. Researchers found:

• A specific association with strong evidence of enrichment exists in the top 1% of genes in the MLI/LA subtype, but not in the isolated lacunar infarcts subtype.

• Genes in the top percentile for the all lacunar stroke analysis were not significantly enriched.

Citation: Traylor M, Anderson CD, Hurford R, Bevan S, Markus HS. Oxidative phosphorylation and lacunar stroke: Genome-wide enrichment analysis of common variants. [Published online ahead of print December 16, 2015]. Neurology. doi: 10.​1212/​WNL.​0000000000002260.