Recent and near-future advances in nucleic acid-based diagnosis of stroke

Stroke is a leading cause of death and disability in adults, but at present, treatment for ischemic stroke reaches only a small percentage of patients. This is because of the very short time window for treatment and the time-consuming evaluation involved. Intense efforts are underway to find novel approaches to expedite stroke diagnosis and treatment. In this review, we provide the rationale for the use of blood-based nucleic acid biomarkers to advance stroke diagnosis. We describe mRNA markers identified in genomic profiling of circulating leukocytes and then outline technological issues involved in the application of these results. We then describe the novel point-of-care technology that is in development for the rapid detection of multiple mRNA molecules in circulating leukocytes.