Importance: Cerebral small vessel disease (SVD) causes a quarter of strokes and is the most common pathology underlying vascular cognitive impairment and dementia. An important step to developing new treatments is better trial methodology. Disease mechanisms in SVD differ from other stroke etiologies; therefore, treatments need to be evaluated in cohorts in which SVD has been well characterized. Furthermore, SV...
Objective: To explore genetic and lifestyle risk factors of MRI-defined brain infarcts (BI) in large population-based cohorts. Methods: We performed meta-analyses of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and examined associations of vascular risk factors and their genetic risk scores (GRS) with MRI-defined BI and a subset of BI, namely, small subcortical BI (SSBI), in 18 population-based cohorts (n = 20,949) f...