Preventing cardiovascular events in stroke patients

Having a stroke means you are more likely to experience a subsequent cardiovascular event. Cardiovascular events happen when something interrupts the heart’s function. This interruption might damage the heart, lead to a heart attack or cause other complications to develop.

Stroke patients undergoing treatment designed to reduce their chance of experiencing a cardiovascular event still have up to a four per cent chance of having another stroke each year. It is important for us to develop more treatments aimed at preventing these individuals from experiencing additional strokes or cardiovascular events.

During this project, we will use Mendelian randomisation to identify if there is a causal relationship between protein levels in a stroke patient’s body and subsequent cardiovascular events. Mendelian randomisation is a statistical approach that uses genetics to provide information about the relationship between the cause (exposure) and effect (outcome) of a disease.

Project aims

We will undertake Mendelian randomisation analysis in stroke patients to identify drug targets that may play a role in subsequent cardiovascular events. Drug target Mendelian randomisation is used to identify drugs that we could repurpose for use in diseases other than those they were originally approved for.

We will focus our analysis on proteins serving as existing drug targets. This will allow us to identify and repurpose drugs that could be effective in reducing the likelihood of subsequent events in individuals who have already suffered from a stroke.

This research is part of a PhD project and is being led by Andrew Elmore.