Despite efforts at controlling traditional risk factors, stroke remains a devastating and all-too-common disease. Identifying new markers for patients at higher risk of stroke would aid in future risk factor management as well as potentially offering new venues for preventive therapies. In this issue of Stroke , Efstathiou et al1 report on a highly significant inverse relation between adiponectin levels and subsequent 5-year mortality. Adiponectin, a recently discovered cytokine, has previously been theorized to be involved in the development of atherosclerotic disease.2 Adiponectin appears to have both anti-inflammatory and antiatherogenic properties, and as such, it was expected that there would be an inverse relation between the serum level of adiponectin and subsequent cerebrovascular mortality. In their study, Efstathiou et al confirm this inverse relation, finding that patients with adiponectin levels in the lowest tertile had a 92.8% 5-year mortality compared with a 10.5% mortality in patients with adiponectin levels in the highest tertile.1 This corresponds to an 8-fold increase in risk for individuals with low adiponectin levels compared with those with the highest tertile of adiponectin levels. Similar results with adiponectin have been …