Response to Letter Regarding Article,“New Strategy to Reduce the Global Burden of Stroke”

We appreciate the interest of Estol1 in our recently published article.2 Although acknowledging the originality of our approach to primary stroke prevention and soundness of the epidemiological project we plan to perform during the next 10 years, Estol raises 3 main questions: (1) can we afford to add 10 more years of millions of dead stroke patients while experimenting with a new strategy?; (2) should not we focus on already proven, yet underused conventional vascular prevention programs?; and (3) do we need to carry out our research if the information will be soon available using Big Data analytics? Estol also questions the need for regional-specific risk factors and prevention strategies and the enormous effort required to implement our primary prevention strategy.The answer to the first question is definitely no, we have to act now, and this is exactly what our article called …