Objective. The purpose of our study was to understand the association between serum triglycerides and outcomes in acute ischemic stroke (AIS) patients. Methods. A cohort of all adult patients presenting to the Emergency Department (ED) with an AIS from March 2004 to December 2005 were selected. The lipid profile levels were measured within 24 hours of stroke onset. Demographics, admission stroke severity (NIHSS), functional outcome at discharge (modified Rankin Scale (mRS)), and mortality at 3 months were recorded. Results. The final cohort consisted of 334 subjects. A lower level of triglycerides at presentation was found to be significantly associated with worse National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) ( ), worse mRS ( ), and death at 3 months ( ). After adjusting for age and gender and NIHSS, the association between triglyceride and mortality at 3 months was not significant ( ). Conclusion. Lower triglyceride levels seem to be associated with a worse prognosis in AIS. 1. Introduction Ischemic stroke is the third leading cause of death worldwide with 5 million annual deaths [1]. Every years approximately 795,000 people experience a stroke and someone dies of stroke in the United States every 3-4 minutes [2]. One of the prominent objectives of stroke research has been to investigate factors that could potentially improve stroke outcome. Acute factors affecting stroke outcome such as awareness of symptoms [3], blood pressure [4], elevated glucose [5], and electrocardiographic intervals [6] have all been of interest. In this paper, we turn our attention to the lipid profile in the setting of acute ischemic stroke. It is known that high serum lipids including triglycerides constitute major risk factors for stroke [7, 8]. Little has been reported to date on the role of triglycerides in acute stroke and their role in poststroke recovery. The few studies that have evaluated this association have reported diverse associations [9–12]. The purpose of our research was to study the relation between poststroke serum triglyceride levels and functional stroke outcome, in a large prospective cohort of acute ischemic stroke patients. 2. Methods This study is a substudy of an Emergency Department (ED) acute stroke registry. The ED Stroke registry is an institutional review board approved prospective consecutive cohort study. All adult patients presenting to the ED of our academic tertiary care centre with a diagnosis of acute ischemic stroke were eligible for inclusion. For this substudy, pediatric stroke patients (age <18 years), patients with hemorrhagic
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