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Cerebrovascular disease

Assessing the brain as an end-organ of vascular disease

A spectrum of common illnesses that constitute risk factors for cardiovascular diseases is associated with both cognitive impairment and high population mortality. Many clinical trials are focused on the prevention of cardiovascular mortality, but cognitive impairment should now be regarded as a similarly important outcome.

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Figure 1: Age-specific prevalence of various vascular diseases (left-hand axis), and brain size as a percentage of intracranial volume ('brain volume'; right-hand axis) from the original and offspring cohorts of the Framingham Heart Study.5

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DeCarli, C. Assessing the brain as an end-organ of vascular disease. Nat Rev Cardiol 9, 435–436 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrcardio.2012.92

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