The main objective of Jara’s thesis was to dig into the genetic risk factors associated with ischemic stroke and use them to find novel associations. To achieve this, Jara performed genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of ischemic stroke risk and subtypes in the Spanish population, multigrain analysis of GWAS of cardio embolism and atrial fibrillation, developed a clinical polygenic risk score to predict cardioembolic stroke and performed mendelian randomisation analyses to evaluate causality between some metalloproteinase levels in plasma and risk of ischemic stroke and poor functional outcome post-stroke.