Dear Practitioner,

We are pleased to introduce this special issue of MD Conference Express®, which presents the official peer-reviewed highlights from the 2015 International Stroke Conference (ISC) held February 11 to 13, in Nashville, Tennessee. The ISC provides a unique forum for colleagues with a wide range of research interests and expertise in stroke pathophysiology, prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation to gather and exchange ideas.

MD Conference Express provides timely, peer-reviewed highlights of high-impact presentations from the live conference, long before they are published in the academic literature, and it is a trusted education resource. The articles selected for this issue underwent a rigorous 5-step peer-review process to ensure their accuracy and provide a reliable interim information source prior to the research being vetted by the standard journal peer-review process.

The presentations selected for this issue of MD Conference Express were chosen for their novelty and importance to stroke care providers and other interested clinicians. Clinical trial highlights included insights into the benefit of endovascular therapy in some types of stroke. Endovascular treatment was shown to be safe and effective for the first time by the MR CLEAN study. In patients with an intracranial anterior circulation occlusion, endovascular treatment performed within 6 hours of onset plus medical therapy improved modified Rankin scale scores at 90 days. A substantial treatment effect was found in the MR CLEAN study, with fewer patients having a disability and more patients having a lesser degree of disability in the treatment arm compared with medical therapy alone.

The safety of thrombectomy after a large vessel occlusion in the anterior circulation was shown in the SWIFT PRIME study, which found that significantly more patients had less disability and functional independence. The CADISS trial showed that the recurrent stroke rate in patients with acute cervical dissection is actually much lower than previously reported. The CADISS trial also found that there was no significant difference in outcomes between antiplatelet and anticoagulant therapy for stroke prevention in these patients.

Our special updates include a review of stroke risk assessment and imaging of the cerebrovascular wall, the use of noninvasive brain stimulation to address poststroke aphasia, and a look at the impact of stroke around the world. Our feature articles include an overview of the current status of clinical research in stroke.

We hope that you find the articles and practical perspectives that are contained in the pages of this issue of MD Conference Express helpful in integrating this new information into your clinical practice. For more information, please visit www.mdconferencexpress.com.