Jeff June: Why Women’s Health Requires a New Stroke Intelligence Layer

Jeff June, Innovation and Ecosystem Leader at University Lab Partners, MedTech Innovator, Founding CEO and Board Member at Ischemia Care, shared a post on LinkedIn:

“Why Women’s Health Requires a New Stroke Intelligence Layer

AHA Highlights Pregnancy as an opportunity in Stroke Care

A new analysis presented at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference 2026 should stop all for a moment and take notice.

Women with a prior ischemic stroke were more than twice as likely to suffer another stroke during pregnancy or in the early postpartum period compared to women without a stroke history. Not marginally higher. Not context-dependent. More than double.

And yet, what’s most striking isn’t the risk itself.

It’s how little we are equipped to see it coming. If you haven’t thought about stroke before, please give this article a thought, and I may start posting a educational series about stroke around the edges, because stroke is not one thing, it is many things that add up to a big thing.

The uncomfortable truth behind the headline

Pregnancy doesn’t cause stroke risk in isolation. It exposes unresolved biology.

The study shows:

• A 34.8% recurrence rate among pregnant women with prior ischemic stroke
• Risk amplification with obesity and prior myocardial infarction
• No clear clinical guidelines for managing these patients as a defined high-risk group

What’s missing from today’s care pathways isn’t effort or compassion. It’s early mechanistic clarity.

We ask women to navigate pregnancy after stroke with:

• Imaging that explains anatomy, not biology
• Risk factors that are retrospective, not predictive
• Care plans that react after symptoms appear

That is not precision medicine. It’s delayed recognition.

Women’s stroke risk is not a monolith

Stroke in women is different. It differs by:

1. Hormonal state
2. Immune response
3. Vascular biology
4. Timing across pregnancy and postpartum windows

Yet most stroke classification still relies on categories built for general populations, applied after the fact, and averaged across sex.

When a woman with prior stroke becomes pregnant, we often don’t know:

• Why her first stroke happened
• Whether the underlying mechanism is still active
• How risk is evolving week-to-week during pregnancy

So we label the pregnancy ‘high risk’ without understanding what we’re managing.

This is where stroke care needs to evolve

My background is in stroke, biological mechanisms, and clinical decisions support. So, I humbly suggest something to consider.

I believe a reasonable goal of stroke care (given time, cost and resources) is not to deliver a single ‘answer,’ but to provide:

• Mechanism-aware insight when uncertainty is highest
• Probabilistic signals rather than rigid subtype labels
• Female-specific analysis that respects biological differences, rather than generalize broader population inferences (i.e. are male strokes different?)
• Time-from-onset sensitivity, because biology moves faster than follow-up imaging

That matters even more in pregnancy, where every decision compounds.

A different way to think about prevention

This new AHA analysis rightly calls for:

• Pre-conception counseling
• Multidisciplinary care teams
• Heightened surveillance

But surveillance without insight becomes burden.

What women need is earlier signal, not more appointments.

Imagine a world where:

• Stroke mechanism is inferred before pregnancy, not discovered after recurrence
• Risk stratification adapts across pregnancy stages
• Postpartum care plans are biologically informed, not generic

That’s not futuristic. It’s achievable with the data we already collect, if we connect it differently.

Women’s health is not a niche. It’s the stress test.

Pregnancy is one of the most profound physiologic stress tests humans undergo.

If our stroke systems fail women here, they fail everywhere else too.

This study doesn’t just highlight risk. It highlights a design flaw in how we approach stroke intelligence.

If you have read this far, know that I am reimaging a company I founded, Ischemia Care, and women’s health is not an add-on to our strategy, it is the strategy. I share this with you because I think about this space relentlessly and this is not a convenient article, it’s top of mind and we need to find a way forward.

Because when care works for women at their most vulnerable, it works better for everyone.”

Find more posts featuring Jeff June on Hemostasis Today.