When a patient suffers a stroke, she or he suddenly loses some crucial function of the brain because of blockage or rupture of a blood vessel within the brain. Although strokes can range in severity from mild with full recovery to massive and fatal, they are so frequent that they are the second most common cause of death and among the leading causes of permanent disability worldwide.

Although scientists have identified several important risk factors for many forms of stroke, including hypertension, cigarette smoking, diabetes, high cholesterol, atrial fibrillation, to name a few, our understanding of why strokes occur remains limited. This limited understanding prevents doctors from predicting more accurately who is at highest risk for developing a stroke in the future, and from developing more effective treatments to prevent stroke from ever occurring at all.

Research in the Rosand lab is focused on identifying the regions in the human genome where variation may influence the risk of developing stroke. In the context of a large multi-disciplinary collaborative community, we characterize patients in great detail, using questionnaires, physical examination, and neuroimaging. We then apply cutting-edge research tools to understand how stroke patients differ from those individuals who have never had a stroke, as well as how subgroups of stroke patients may differ from one another.