Baseline Serum Urate and 90-Day Functional Outcomes following Acute Ischemic Stroke

It is increasingly recognized that there is an association between elevated serum urate and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality [1, 2] . This relationship is consistently apparent in cohorts with vascular risk factors and those with established cardio-vascular disease. However, the situation is less clear in the acute period after stroke. Some studies show that increasing serum urate levels link with worse outcome [3] and risk of early clinical deterioration [4] while others report a link with good outcome [5] . There are biological reasons for and against a beneficial effect of urate in the peri-infarct period but unfortunately available evidence does not allow us to draw conclusions either way. Also, no study has evaluated the association with 90-day functional outcome, the standard used in clinical trials. We explored this association using data from the Virtual International Stroke Trials Archive (VISTA) [6] resource.