Our new preprint on the link between circulating cytokine levels and recurrent events in stroke patients

🔈 Our new preprint explores the associations of the circulating levels of 22 cytokines with risk of new cardiovascular events among stroke survivors ❗

👉 We analyzed baseline plasma sample data from 486 acute stroke patients within 5 days after stroke symptom onset, who were part of the multicentre prospective DEMDAS cohort.

👉Patients were followed up with in-person and telephone visits for 5 years and we assessed their risk of future recurrent stroke/TIA and recurrent vascular events (stroke, coronary events, death)

📊 Levels of MIF and CD62E (=E-selectin) were strongly associated with future risk of recurrent stroke

📊 The recurrent stroke risk for patients at the top vs. bottom quartile was >2x higher for both biomarkers. Adding these two biomarkers to prediction models improved predictive performance on top of vascular risk factors and CRP levels.

💡 Such data are important for developing inflammatory biomarkers of vascular risk, as immune therapies for cardiovascular disease are emerging.

💡For translating purposes, it is important to bridge large-scale exploratory work with focused studies on clinically relevant datasets representing scenarios, where findings would be applicable.

🔗 Link to the preprint: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.12.25320408v1

Deep acknowledgements to Lanyue Zhang, Ali Antabi, and Jana Mattar, who ran the analyses and did the experimental work. Many thanks to all collaborators from the study sites