Results of Insulin Resistance Intervention Stroke Study Presented at ISC

The results of a large international stroke study supported by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) were presented today at the International Stroke Conference 2016 in Los Angeles and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggesting a potential new method to prevent stroke and heart attack in high-risk patients who have already had one stroke or transient ischemic attack.  

University of Cincinnati researcher Dawn Kleindorfer, MD, a professor of neurology and rehabilitation medicine at UC and co-director of the UC Stroke Team, was a co-author on the study, which ran from 2005 to 2013. The Insulin Resistance Intervention after Stroke (IRIS) trial, suggests that Pioglitazone, a drug used for type 2 diabetes, may prevent recurrent stroke and heart attacks in people with insulin resistance but without diabetes. It is the first study to provide such evidence that a drug targeting cell metabolism may prevent secondary strokes and heart attacks even before diabetes develops.  

Learn more about the IRIS study and its results at www.ninds.nih.gov. The article can be found in the online edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.