Gene variant’s link to stroke grew stronger with age
Stroke prevalence was 10.37% in gene variant carriers versus 7.61% in noncarriers in an observational study of 112,500 Taiwan Biobank participants.
Cross-sectional study
Limit: Recruitment favored healthy volunteers, potentially biasing stroke associations
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
Researchers studied 112,500 Taiwan Biobank participants aged 30 to 70 in an observational analysis. They linked genetic and questionnaire data from 2008–2020 with medical records from 2000–2020. The records identified 8,588 cases of ischemic stroke, caused by blocked blood flow to the brain.
The team examined p.R544C, a variant of the NOTCH3 gene carried by 1,061 participants. After accounting for age, health conditions and lifestyle factors, carriers had 1.54 times the stroke odds of noncarriers. The association grew stronger across older age groups. Carriers aged 61 to 70 had 11.40 times the stroke odds of noncarriers aged 30 to 40—a comparison combining age and variant status, not isolating the variant’s association.
Why it matters
The study bears on whether stroke risk assessment should consider genetic susceptibility differently at different stages of adulthood.
Caveats
This observational analysis cannot establish cause and effect, and it identified strokes through medical diagnosis codes. It excluded people with dementia or a history of other stroke types and did not cover ages outside 30 to 70.
From the paper
- Participants
Among the 112,500 participants, 1061 (0.94%) carried at least one A allele (AG+AA), whereas 111,439 (99.06%) were homozygous for the G allele (GG).
- Result
The AG+AA genotype of rs201118034 was significantly associated with increased odds of ischemic stroke compared with the GG genotype (OR: 1.54, 95% CI: 1.24-1.90, p < 0.001).
- Limitation
First, environmental and lifestyle factors were included as covariates but not evaluated as effect modifiers, limiting insight into potential gene-environment interactions.
Quoted word for word from the full text on PubMed Central.
The paper
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
International Journal of Medical Sciences, Sep 24, 2026, Open access
