Common mechanisms and pathways in Stroke and Alzheimer's disease.

Common mechanisms and pathways in Stroke and Alzheimer's disease. It has long been recognized that stroke and (Alzheimer’s Disease) AD often co-occur and have an overlapping pathogenesis. As such, these two diseases are not considered fellow travelers, but rather partners in crime. This multidisciplinary consortium includes epidemiologists, geneticists, radiologists, neurologists with a longstanding track-record on the etiology of stroke and AD. This project aims to improve our understanding of the co-occurrence of stroke and AD. An essential concept of our proposal is that stroke and AD are sequential diseases that have overlapping pathyphysiological mechanisms in addition to shared risk factors. We will particularly focus on these common mechanisms and disentangle when and how these mechanisms diverge into causing either stroke, or AD, or both. Another important concept is that mechanisms under study will not only include the known pathways of ischemic vasculopathy and CAA, but we will explore and unravel novel mechanisms linking stroke and AD. We will do so by exploiting our vast international network in order to link various big datasets and by incorporating novel analytical strategies with emerging technologies in the field of genomics, metabolomics, and brain MR-imaging.