IL6 and stroke disorder: We excluded studies for the following reasons: they were non-systematic reviews (20), they were unobtainable (3), participants did not have stroke at baseline (75), they did not measure blood IL-6 levels (12), death or disability was not reported (20), they reported odds ratios for the association of IL-6 above and below a threshold (2) [15],[16], they reported correlation coefficients only (4) [17]–[20], they reported mean levels in patients with good and bad outcomes only (5) [21]–[25], or they did not report numerical results (1) [26].