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For decades, stroke prevention has revolved around a list of separate—and often separately treated—risk factors: blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, smoking and inactivity. According to Dr. Gustavo Saposnik, it's time to start considering biological age as a risk factor for stroke.

The same biological processes associated with aging, including chronic inflammation and reduced cellular energy production, also drive conditions such as hypertension and diabetes and increase the risk of stroke. People may be living longer than ever before, but stroke is appearing in younger adults more frequently than in previous generations, and stroke incidence is also rising in older populations.

Saposnik, a neurologist and researcher at St. Michael's Hospital, argues in a new paper that stroke is often not an isolated vascular event, but instead the first obvious sign that the body's biological aging process is accelerating. To combat it, we need to think about longevity.

"What longevity science adds is an organizing principle," says Saposnik, who is also a professor of neurology at the University of Toronto, director of the Stroke Outcomes and Decision Neuroscience Research Unit at Unity Health Toronto and vice president of the World Stroke Organization.

"These are not 10 separate battles but one, against the pace of biological aging.

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