The Feinberg Award Lecture 2013

Thanks to my nominators and the International Stroke Conference program committee for selecting me for this year’s Feinberg award, which I would like to accept on behalf of all the investigators and coordinators who participated in the Warfarin Aspirin Symptomatic Intracranial Disease (WASID) trial, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Wingspan registry, and the Stenting and Aggressive Medical Management for Preventing Recurrent Stroke in Intracranial Stenosis (SAMMPRIS) trial. This award is particularly meaningful to me because Bill Feinberg was a member of the original WASID Planning Committee when he passed away. He was a generous collaborator and a wonderful person who is still greatly missed by those of us who knew him. It is a particular honor to receive an award that is named after him.Intracranial atherosclerotic stenosis is an important cause of ischemic stroke particularly in Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.1–4 Given the racial and ethnic make-up of the world population, intracranial stenosis may be the most common cause of stroke worldwide.4–7 It is also associated with a particularly high risk of recurrent stroke compared with most other stroke subtypes.8 I first became interested in this disease during my residency training at Tufts—New England Medical Center with Lou Caplan and the late Mike Pessin, both master clinicians and teachers, who at the time were describing much of the clinical phenomenology and stroke mechanisms associated with atherosclerosis of the major intracranial arteries.9–12 I owe my fascination with stroke neurology to them. It was during my stroke fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic that Tony Furlan and Cathy Sila, both excellent mentors, stimulated my interest in clinical trials. This was the heyday of some of the most important trials in our field (North American Symptomatic Carotid Endarterectomy Trial [NASCET], Asymptomatic Carotid Atherosclerosis …