Let me just start with saying that I’m very excited that I will be giving this presentation during the young stroke physicians and researchers session. So we all know that white matter hyperintensities are the most common neuroimaging feature of small vessel disease in the brain. We also know quite a lot about their clinical significance. They lead to stroke, dementia, they contribute to cognitive impairment, and also a whole host of other clinical phenotypes that are important...
Let me just start with saying that I’m very excited that I will be giving this presentation during the young stroke physicians and researchers session. So we all know that white matter hyperintensities are the most common neuroimaging feature of small vessel disease in the brain. We also know quite a lot about their clinical significance. They lead to stroke, dementia, they contribute to cognitive impairment, and also a whole host of other clinical phenotypes that are important. Now, in this project, we will be building on our previous cross-sectional work, where we tested for associations between clinical phenotypes at scale and total volume of white matter hyperintensities in about 45,000 people in the UK Biobank, one of the biggest biomedical databases in the world. So in this study, we found that an increased volume of white matter hyperintensities was associated with deleterious clinical outcomes across body systems. However, we looked at concurrent associations. So what we want to do this time around is actually look at longitudinal volume change. We will be using about 4,500 individuals, a subsample from the UK Biobank and again we have access to imaging and clinical data. So essentially the question that we want to answer is does white matter hyperintensity volume change over time lead to the same or different clinical phenotypes and what are these phenotypes? So far most research has focused on white matter hyperintensity progression but we know that white matter hyperintensities can recover in some individuals. So in this project we also want to compare people whose white matter hyperintensities progressed to those where they regressed. So we want to speak a little bit more about the phenomenon of white matter hyperintensity regression and shed light on the clinical phenotypes associated with that.
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