Stroke Life Style: Advancing Our Understanding of Disease Mechanism and Therapy

Dear Colleagues,

Old age is associated with an enhanced susceptibility to stroke, and aged animals recover poorly from brain injuries as compared to young rodents. Despite the initial hope that cell-based therapies may stimulate restorative processes in the ischemic brain, it is now recognized that aging processes may promote an unfavorable environment for such treatments. Virtually all drug interventions that have been successful preclinically in experimental stroke have failed to translate this success to the clinical setting. The failure to consider the complexity and heterogeneity of human diseases and co-morbidities may render neuroprotective drugs less efficacious in clinical practice. It is becoming evident that subtle but continuous neuroinflammation can provide the ground for disorders such as cerebral small vessel disease (cSVD) and subsequently dementia. Moreover, advanced aging and a number of highly prevalent risk factors such as obesity hypertension, diabetes, and atherosclerosis are increasingly understood to act as “silent contributors” to neuroinflammation—not only establishing the condition as a central pathophysiological mechanism, but also constantly fueling it. Acute neuroinflammation, often in the context of traumatic or ischemic CNS lesions, aggravates the acute damage and can lead to a number of pathological illnesses, such as depression, post-stroke dementia and potentially neurodegeneration. All of those sequelae impair recovery and most of them provide the ground for further cerebrovascular events; thus, a vicious cycle develops. We also cover brain vasculature recent advances in signaling pathways that can potentially protect cells as well as treatment options for the maintenance of brain capillaries to prevent diseases associated with brain vasculature remodeling in response to aging and associated comorbidities.

This Special Issue of JCM will provide an up-to-date information on molecular, cellular, and behavioral events associated with stroke epidemiology and new therapeutic options for treatment options.

Prof. Dr. Aurel Popa-Wagner
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Clinical Medicine is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.