Update on stroke risk factors

As medicine moves into the 21st century, with the added pressures of increasing costs and limited resources, successful diminution of the impact of stroke on the population will require shifting our emphasis away from treating end stages of generalized atherosclerosis and other underlying diseases to preventing underlying diseases and stroke. This approach will require more sophisticated and more definitive studies to identify, verify, and explain better the relative importance of known risk factors, the interactions of various risk factors with one another, and the existence of currently unknown or unverified risk factors. In this article, we review the current state of knowledge about certain stroke risk factors in light of new epidemiologic studies conducted in the last decade with emphasis on modifiable risk factors, now and in the future.