Genetic risk factors for ischaemic stroke and its subtypes (the METASTROKE collaboration): a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies.

Summary Background Various genome-wide association studies(GWAS) have been done in ischaemic stroke, identifying a few loci associatedwith the disease, but sample sizes have been 3500 cases or less. We established the METASTROKE collaboration with the aim of validating associationsfrom previous GWAS and identifying novel genetic associationsthrough meta-analysis of GWAS datasets for ischaemic stroke and its subtypes.