Abstract
Welcome to the first edition of IJS for 2018, the 13th year of publication. It is always timely at the beginning of the year to anticipate what lies ahead. It is certainly going to be a full year for IJS! There will be the usual series of meetings in the stroke community, starting with the International Stroke Conference in Los Angeles, and then the European Stroke Organisation Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden. This year we will have the additional biennial World Stroke Congress in Montreal, in October. This promises to be a unique event. First, World Stroke Day will focus on rehabilitation for the first time, which reflects the importance of this discipline within the stroke community and to those living with stroke. To highlight this, we will be having a combined WSO-LANCET-IJS session, of which the IJS component will focus on rehabilitation. This dovetails nicely with the Rehabilitation Roundtable series of papers we published in 2017 which is available as a free access downloadable compilation on the SAGE website and has been an extremely popular consensus series (http://journals.sagepub.com/page/wso/srrr).
Research methodology, which will be explored in our first themed edition of the year, is always of interest to those launching into a career where some of these concepts will underpin everyday activity, I know that I would have very much liked to have had a framework such as this when I first started my research career 40 years ago. Topics such as first steps, limitations, systematic review methodology, high quality observational studies, and health services research, are included.
While there will be many themes of interest throughout the year, I have found that one that seems prominent in 2018, young stroke to be most intriguing. Topics such as paediatric stroke guidelines, return to work among young people with stroke, secondary stroke prevention during pregnancy, and sudden unexpected death in young adults and children after stroke are included. This is an under-researched area of stroke medicine but is attracting increasing attention among our stroke paediatrician colleagues.
A big year ahead, we look forward to keeping you informed on developments around the globe.