The research group in neurovascular diseases at Vall d'Hebron Institute of Research (VHIR) is the only Spanish participant in the major genetic study on stroke worldwide. The work has studied the genetic code of more than 72.000 people, patients and controls, and concludes that the classification of stroke according to its cause goes beyond the own disease, and explains also clear genetic differences between the known three subtypes of ischemic stroke. These findings will have, on the future, a great clinical impact, as they change the way of seeing ictus but, especially, they mean the access to the search of specific therapeutic targets for each one of these subtypes. The study has been published in the journal The Lancet Neurology in the frame of a multicentral study without precedents.The study -called METASTROKE- discriminates, in genetic key and without doubts, between 3 subtypes of ischemic stroke: atherothrombotic, lacunar and cardioembolic. These 3 subtypes were already known and qualified like this according to its cause. The fact of proving that, at the genetic level, these three subtypes of stroke look like three different diseases opens a new range of diagnostic and therapeutic possibilities. As explains Dr. Joan Montaner, head of the Neurovascular diseases group and Coordinator of Neurosciences Area at VHIR, "if the reasons of a cardioembolic, lacunar or atherothrombotic stroke are different and, therefore, necessarily also are different the causal mechanisms, and adding that genetically the differences are clear, neurologists must ask ourselves if we are really facing the same disease. Probably the stroke, as we know it up to today, it is not properly a disease but a syndrome and is a clinical manifestation of different processes of atherothrombotic, lacunar and cardioembolic origin."