Approved Research

Genetic risk factors associated with post-stroke respiratory and urinary tract infections

Lay summary

Stroke is the second cause of mortality and the main cause of disability in adults. Infections that appear after a stroke cause complications in a third of the cases, and can make recovery difficult. Therefore, recovery not only depends on factors such as age, sex, stroke severity, and comorbidities. In addition, urinary tract or respiratory infections can cause complications: in a study with over 10,000 patients, they identified pneumonia in 5.6%, and they saw that, at 30 days, the mortality in patients with pneumonia was 27%, compared with 4% mortality in the patients without pneumonia.

There are a lot of studies that provide evidence about a dysregulation of interactions between the nervous system and the immune system after an ischemic stroke. Therefore, post-stroke immunosuppression is a risk factor for infection. With our study, we intend to find genetic factors associated with post-stroke infections using Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS). GWAS allow finding differences in gene variants between case and control individuals and, in this way, identifying polymorphisms associated with the risk of infection after a stroke.

The estimated duration of our project is around 12 months, since we intend to recruit a replication cohort to be able to replicate the results found in the discovery cohort.

The study will provide novel insights into the pathogenesis of post-stroke respiratory and urinary tract infections, highlighting multiple candidate loci for future experiments.