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Speaker: Sajeevan Sujanthan (left)
About the Presentation: Cognitive impairment is a common yet underrecognized outcome after stroke and cardiovascular disease, and is often not assessed comprehensively in clinical trials. This presentation will discuss the need for more inclusive cognitive endpoints and introduce the MACE-Cog framework (Ganesh et al., 2026), a holistic approach designed to capture cognitive outcomes in all participants, including those unable to complete traditional cognitive testing.
Learning Objectives:
Understand why cognition is an underrepresented endpoint in stroke and cardiovascular clinical trials.
Recognize the limitations of relying solely on cognitive tests (in-person and remote).
Discuss how the MACE-Cog framework provides a more inclusive and pragmatic approach to cognitive outcome assessment
About the Speaker: Sajeevan Sujanthan is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Sunnybrook Research Institute, supervised by Dr. Richard Swartz and co-supervised by Dr. Aravind Ganesh. His research focuses on improving the assessment of cognitive outcomes after stroke and advancing the use of cognition as a meaningful endpoint in large clinical trials, with the goal of improving care for individuals living with stroke and other neurological conditions.
Speaker: Amelie Metz (right)
About the Presentation: Cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD) is a key contributor to cognitive impairment and dementia. However, most CSVD research has been conducted in cohorts from Europe and North America, with limited representation of low- and middle-income countries. This study characterizes CSVD in a large Latin American cohort by quantifying white matter hyperintensities (WMH), lacunes, and microbleeds in cognitively healthy older adults and individuals with AD or FTD. The authors further investigate associations between CSVD burden, cardiovascular risk factors, and cognitive performance, with the aim of improving the understanding of the contribution of microvascular pathology to cognitive aging and dementia in an understudied population.
About the Speaker: Amelie is a Neuroscience PhD student at McGill University, supervised by Mahsa Dadar. Her research focuses on characterizing patterns and trajectories of neurodegeneration and cerebrovascular burden across Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) variants using structural MRI.