Cerebrovascular disease includes a variety of medical conditions that affect the blood vessels of the brain and the cerebral circulation. Arteries supplying oxygen and nutrients to the brain are often damaged or deformed in these disorders. The most common presentation of cerebrovascular disease is an ischemic stroke or mini-stroke and sometimes a hemorrhagic stroke. Hypertension is the most important contributing risk factor for stroke and cerebrovascular diseases as it can change the structure of blood vessels and result in atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis narrows blood vessels in the brain, resulting in decreased cerebral perfusion. Other risk factors that contribute to stroke include smoking and diabetes. Narrowed cerebral arteries can lead to ischemic stroke, but continually elevated blood pressure can also cause tearing of vessels, leading to a hemorrhagic stroke.
Louise McCullough is an American neurologsit who is the Prof. Roy M. & Phyllis Gough Huffington Distinguished Chair of Neurology and is actively engaged in stroke research at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Texas. She provides neurological care at Memorial Hermann Hospital, which has a state-of-the-art stroke center and is co-director of the Mischer Neuroscience Institute.
Louis R. Caplan is an American physician who is a senior member of the Division of Cerebrovascular Disease at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston. He is a Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, Boston, and the founder of the Harvard Stroke Registry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Caplan is the author or editor of 51 books and more than 700 articles in medical journals.
The Center for Cerebrovascular Research at the University of California, San Francisco is a collective of faculty and staff investigating matters related to cerebral circulation, particularly cerebrovascular disease resulting from narrowing of major blood vessels in the brain and vascular malformation of the brain. While research offices are located on Parnassus campus, San Francisco General Hospital hosts the center's laboratories and facilities. The center coordinates with additional faculty in various fields of neuroscience and vascular biology. Sponsors include the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and the UCSF departments of Anesthesia, Neurological Surgery and Neurology.
Charles Miller Fisher was a Canadian neurologist whose notable contributions include the first detailed descriptions of lacunar strokes, the identification of transient ischemic attacks as stroke precursors, the identification of the link between carotid atherosclerosis and stroke, and the description of a variant form of Guillain–Barré syndrome which bears his name.
Philip E. Stieg is an American academic physician and neurosurgeon. He has been the Neurosurgeon-in-Chief of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center since 2000.
Pankaj Sharma is a British professor of Clinical Neurology at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and consultant neurologist at Imperial College London. He is director of the Institute of Cardiovascular Research at Royal Holloway (ICR2UL), and formerly head of the Imperial College Cerebrovascular Research Unit (ICCRU) at Imperial College London. His main interest is in identifying genes for stroke, particularly in those of South Asian heritage.
Joshua B. Bederson is an American neurosurgeon, Leonard I. Malis, MD/Corinne and Joseph Graber Professor of Neurosurgery, and System Chair of Neurosurgery at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, and an attending neurosurgeon at The Mount Sinai Hospital.
The University of Utah School of Medicine is located on the upper campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was founded in 1905 and is currently the only MD-granting medical school in the state of Utah.
Jonathan L. Halperin is an American cardiologist and the author of Bypass (ISBN 0-89586-509-2), among the most comprehensive works on the subject of coronary artery bypass surgery. In addition, he is the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn Professor of Medicine at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine as well as Director of Clinical Cardiology in the Zena and Michael A. Wierner Cardiovascular Institute at The Mount Sinai Medical Center, both in New York City. Halperin was the principal cardiologist responsible for both the design and execution of the multi-center Stroke Prevention in Atrial Fibrillation (SPAF) clinical trials, funded by the National Institutes of Health, which helped develop antithrombotic strategies to prevent stroke, and he subsequently directed the SPORTIF clinical trials, which evaluated the first oral direct thrombin inhibitor for prevention of stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation.
Martin A. Samuels, MD, DSc (hon), FAAN, MACP, FRCP, FANA, was an American physician, neurologist and medical educator whose unique teaching style and contributions, accessible to a wide audience, were widely known and celebrated. He wrote and spoke on the relationships between neurology and the rest of medicine, and linked the nervous system with cardiac function, highlighting the mechanisms and prevention of neurogenic cardiac disease.
The Mischer Neuroscience Institute is a combined research and education effort between the Vivian L. Smith Department of Neurosurgery and the Department of Neurology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston and Memorial Hermann Hospital. Located in Houston, the Institute draws patients from around the world for specialized treatment of diseases of the brain and spine. It was the first center in Texas and one of only a few institutions in the country to fully integrate neurology, neurosurgery, neuroradiology, neuro-oncology, spine surgery, pain medicine and neurorehabilitation.
John Romano was an American physician, psychiatrist, and educator whose major interest was in medical education and the important relationship between psychiatry and medicine. He founded the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester and served as chairman from 1946 to 1971. He published over 200 scientific papers and served on several editorial boards including the Journal of Psychiatric Research.
Camilo Ramiro Gomez, is an American neurologist, medical educator, and researcher. He is one of the first 100 vascular neurologists certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN), and one of the founders of the subspecialty of interventional neurology in the United States.
Vladimir Hachinski is a Canadian clinical neuroscientist and researcher based at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at Western University. He is also a Senior Scientist at London's Robarts Research Institute. His research pertains in the greatest part to stroke and dementia, the interactions between them and their joint prevention through holistic brain health promotion. He and John W. Norris helped to establish the world's first successful stroke unit at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, and, by extension, helped cement stroke units as the standard of care for stroke patients everywhere. He discovered that the control of the heart by the brain is asymmetric, the fight/flight (sympathetic) response being controlled by the right hemisphere and the rest and digest (parasympathetic) response being controlled by the left hemisphere and damage to one key component can lead to heart irregularities and sudden death. This discovery has added fundamental knowledge to how the brain controls the heart and blood pressure and lays the foundation for helping prevent sudden death.
Olajide Williams is an American neurologist and the founder of Hip-Hop Public Health. He is Chief of Staff and Professor of Neurology at Columbia University.
Ralph Lewis Sacco was an American neurologist. He held the Olemberg Family Chair in Neurological Disorders, Miller Professor of Neurology, Public Health Sciences, Human Genetics, and Neurosurgery at the Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami and Chief of the Neurology Service at Jackson Memorial Hospital. In 2020, Sacco was named editor-in-chief of the Stroke journal and the inaugural recipient of the Edgar J. Kenton III Lecture Award from the American Stroke Association.
Raad Shakir CBE is Professor of Neurology at Imperial College London and a Consultant Neurologist at Charing Cross Hospital.
Ramon Diaz-Arrastia is an American neurologist and clinical investigator. He is the John McCrae Dickson, MD Presidential professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, Director of Clinical Traumatic Brain Injury Research, and Attending Neurologist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center.
Jeffrey L. Saver is an American neurologist who is the Carol and James Collins Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles.
