Austrian Stroke Prevention Family Study (ASPS-Fam)

The Austrian Stroke Prevention Family Study (ASPS-Fam) is a single-centre cohort at the Medical University of Graz, Austria. It extends the Austrian Stroke Prevention Study, a community sample of Graz residents started in 1991, by inviting its participants and their first-degree relatives between 2006 and 2013. People with a history of stroke, transient ischemic attack or dementia, or with an abnormal neurological examination, were not included. The study looks at how vascular risk factors and family relations shape brain structure, brain function and damage to vessels elsewhere in the body. Its papers cover the heritability of brain iron, free water in white matter of people with early small vessel disease, and the link between white matter lesions and coronary calcification. The images were not released; the papers offer data on reasonable request.

Composition

According to Leitner et al. (2025), 419 participants had brain MRI; 381 of them come from 169 families with two to six members each. Hofer et al. (2022) count the same 419 participants in 176 families. 267 participants had a diffusion scan, of which 237 passed quality control. Sex and age for the full cohort are not reported in these papers.

Acquisition

MRI was done on a Siemens TimTrio at 3 T with a 12-channel head coil. The protocol includes a 1 mm MPRAGE, T2-weighted and FLAIR images with 3 mm slices, a spoiled multi-echo gradient echo with six echoes used for R2* iron maps, and a diffusion sequence with 12 directions at b = 1000 s/mm². Participants also had cardiac CT on a GE Imatron scanner for Agatston calcium scores. Kneihsl et al. (2024) report a repeat MRI and cardiac CT after a median of 5.8 years in 115 participants.

Annotations

Neuroradiologists rated white matter hyperintensities on the Fazekas scale and recorded lacunes and old infarcts. White matter lesions were segmented manually for volumes. None of these labels are public.

Known limitations

• Images are not shared publicly and no access terms are published.
• The only public file is a table of derived free-water and diffusion values for 188 participants on Mendeley Data.
• How many participants had each sequence, other than diffusion, is not reported for the whole cohort.
• The number of participants with cardiac CT alone is not reported; 324 had both cardiac CT and brain MRI at baseline.