What motivated your team to take on this question at this scale and to focus on both retinal artery occlusions as well as amaurosis? And what were your thoughts on vein occlusions and why those were not included?

Um, we were interested in this question because there's a lot of variability in the prior estimates for stroke risk, and most of these estimates came from studies that used a much smaller or heterogeneous cohort.

We chose to specifically focus on retinal artery occlusions and amaurosis fugax because they're analogous to an ischemic brain stroke and transient ischemic attack.

And looking at these events using an electronic health record database gave us the opportunity to use a much larger patient cohort and have access to longitudinal data to address this question in a way that may be more limited for a smaller scale study.

Regarding vein occlusions, although they also share lots of risk factors with artery occlusions and also confer an increased risk for stroke, we ultimately chose to exclude them from the study because of their differences in pathophysiology and systemic implications.

So looking ahead, what are the next steps, uh, for this line of research? Are there opportunities to better refine this risk prediction or incorporate additional clinical or imaging data?

For sure.

In our study, we didn't examine how specific interventions like revascularization procedures or TPA can modify stroke risk.