2025 UKARFF Early-career Researchers talks: Dr Michael Stringer – Cerebrovascular function in sporadic and genetic cerebral small vessel disease
07/02/2025
Dr. Michael Stringer, funded by Stroke Association, is focused on using small vessel disease (SVD) as a tool to predict and prevent vascular diseases in later life. By developing several innovative imaging protocols, his team discovered that the differences in vascular dysfunction between sporadic and genetic SVD are tissue-specific, rather than being solely driven by the disease subtypes themselves. This finding provides crucial insights into the mechanisms underlying vascular disease and could lead to more precise methods for diagnosis and prevention in at-risk populations.
Dr Michael Stringer, University of Edinburgh, funded by Stroke Association
Small vessel disease (SVD) is one of the most common vascular diseases contributing to high rates of stroke and dementia in the UK. Despite signs of poorer blood vessel function showing up on brain scans decades before a stroke happens, there are no treatments or therapies for those with these early warning signs.
Michael Stringer, a medical physicist, wants to better understand where and why vascular dysfunction happens in the brains of people with SVD. His research recruited people with different types of SVD — sporadic and genetic — and with different severities. By creating several new imaging protocols, his team found that differences in vascular dysfunction between sporadic and genetic SVD were tissue specific and related to disease severity — rather than differing by disease subtype.
Michael’s next steps are to carry out retinal imaging which will shed light on what’s happening in individual blood vessels and to investigate how brain waste is cleared.
Watch the recording
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Meet the speakers
Dr Michael Stringer
Michael is a Stroke Association-funded medical physicist whose research focuses on developing quantitative magnetic resonance imaging methods to assess vascular function. Since 2016 he has been a research fellow, and now lecturer, at the University of Edinburgh, based in the Row Fogo Centre for Research into Ageing and the Brain and UK Dementia Research Institute. He works across several small vessel disease studies, including clinical trials.