Disparities across the Stroke Healthcare Continuum

Stroke care has improved, but not for everyone. Profound inequities persist across sex and gender, socioeconomic position, geography, race and ethnicity, and other intersecting identities. These gaps affect every point on the stroke pathway: exposure to risk factors, access to urgent diagnostics and reperfusion therapies, delivery of guideline-based care, intensity and type of rehabilitation, support for cognitive and emotional recovery, and long-term social and vocational reintegration. Structural barriers, implicit biases, and the limited involvement of people with lived experience in research and policy continue to widen these divides.This Research Topic will bring together work that explains, challenges, and helps transform these patterns of inequity. We seek studies that illuminate how social and structural determinants, such as income, education, gender norms, caregiving roles, geography, and health system design; as well as contributions that analyse stroke risk, access to prevention, acute treatment, and comprehensive rehabilitation across the globe. We are especially interested in contributions that evaluate or propose concrete strategies to close gaps in care: tailored lifestyle and secondary prevention interventions, novel models of telehealth and telestroke, inclusive and shared decision-making, survivor-led initiatives, and system- or policy-level reforms. We also aim to centre the perspectives of people with lived experience by highlighting co-designed or participatory approaches to stroke services and research.We welcome clinical, qualitative, mixed-methods, and health services research, as well as implementation, policy, and methodological papers addressing disparities across the stroke care continuum, including but not limited to:• Inequities in stroke risk factors and lifestyle/secondary prevention interventions, including sex- and gender-responsive or culturally adapted approaches.• Disparities in the implementation of acute stroke care (e.g., imaging, telestroke, thrombolysis/thrombectomy use, and guideline adherence).• Gaps in access to and quality of rehabilitation, cognitive and emotional recovery support, community reintegration, and long-term survivorship care.• Structural, organizational, and policy drivers of inequity, and strategies to address them.• Co-design, participatory, or survivor-led models of research, service development, and shared decision-making.We encourage Original Research, Brief Research Reports, Reviews, Systematic Reviews, Perspectives, and Policy and Practice articles. Multidisciplinary teams, contributions from low-resource or underserved settings, and manuscripts co-authored by people with lived experience of stroke are particularly welcome. This collection aims to generate actionable evidence to guide more equitable, person-centred stroke care worldwide. Topic editors: Deidre De Silva, Shweta Jain Verma Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/76407/disparities-across-the-stroke-healthcare-continuum