On Episode 21 of the Stroke Alert Podcast, host Dr. Negar Asdaghi highlights two articles from the October 2022 issue of Stroke: “Oral Contraceptives, Hormone Replacement Therapy, and Stroke Risk” and “Effectiveness and Safety of Antithrombotic Medication in Patients With Atrial Fibrillation and Intracranial Hemorrhage.” She also interviews Dr. Shadi Yaghi about his article “Direct Oral Anticoagulants Versus Vitamin K Antagonists in Cerebral Venous Thrombosis.” Dr. Negar Asdaghi:         Let's start with some questions. 1) Do hormone replacement therapies or oral contraceptives increase the risk of stroke? And if yes, does the age of the individual or the duration of therapy modify this risk? 2) Should survivors of intracranial hemorrhage who have atrial fibrillation be treated with antithrombotic therapies for secondary prevention of stroke? 3) And finally, what is the anticoagulant of choice for treatment of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis? We have the answers and much more in today's podcast as we continue to bring you the latest in cerebrovascular disorders. You're listening to the Stroke Alert Podcast, and this is the best in Stroke. Stay with us. Welcome back to another amazing issue of the Stroke Alert Podcast. My name is Negar Asdaghi. I'm an Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, and your host for the monthly Stroke Alert Podcast. The October issue of Stroke covers a number of timely topics. As part of our October Literature Synopsis, we have a nice paper by Dr. Farida Sohrabji and colleague, which summarizes three recently published animal studies to evaluate the association between small vessel ischemic injury and either development of Parkinsonism or the future risk of Parkinson's disease. These studies looked at how ischemia, specifically involving the lenticulostriate arteries, can modulate the nigrostriatal dopaminergic pathway and ultimately lead to Parkinsonism. As part of our Original Contributions, we have the results of a small randomized trial out of Korea, which was led by Dr. Yun-Hee Kim from Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine in Seoul, where we learned that doing 20 sessions of transcranial direct current stimulation for about 30 minutes for each session at home can improve post-stroke cognition. This was found to be specifically effective in patients with post-stroke moderate cognitive decline. Now, transcranial current stimulation can be given using a handheld device at home, and if truly proven safe and efficacious in larger studies, can dramatically change the landscape of stroke recovery in cognitive rehabilitation. I encourage you to review these articles in addition to listening to our podcast today. Later in the podcast, I have the great pleasure of interviewing Dr. Shadi Yaghi from Brown University. Shadi will walk us through a systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies to compare the safety and efficacy of direct oral anticoagulants to that of vitamin K antagonists in patients with cerebral venous sinus thrombosis. Our devoted Stroke Alert Podcast listeners recall that we did cover this topic in our March podcast when we reviewed the results of ACTION-CVT, a multicenter international study that was led by none other than Shadi himself. I'm delighted to have him as a guest on my podcast today to talk more about the seminal study and all things cerebral venous sinus thrombosis. But first, with these two articles. Millions of women worldwide use exogenous hormones, most commonly in the form of oral contraceptives and hormone replacement therapies. Despite the many different formulations of these drugs that are now available on the market, the two therapies are similar in that both combined oral contraceptives and hormone replacement therapies, or HRTs, contain various dosage of estrogen and progestin. Now, the principal difference between them being that the hormone contents of oral contraceptiv