The International Stroke Genetics Consortium recently met at St George’s in London. The Consortium has recently been formed with the aim of identifying novel stroke genes. Most previous genetic studies in stroke have suffered from small sample sizes and have given equivocal results. The Consortium members have decided to pool their resources, and stroke DNA collections, to obtain larger sample sizes, which can provide definitive answers. Recently genome-wide association studies have been applied to other complex disease such as diabetes and ischemic heart disease with promising results. The Consortium hopes to use a similar approach to identify novel genetic variance cause predisposing to stroke. The different groups at the London meeting have a total of at least 10,000 well-characterised patients with stroke from whom DNA has been taken.
Administrative aspects of the Consortium are being co-ordinated by Dr Jonathan Rosand from Boston and further details can be obtained from him (email: JROSAND@PARTNERS.ORG).
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