Recently, genome‐wide association studies (GWAS) have shown that RTEL1 dysfunction appears to be closely related to certain cancers and age‐related diseases such as lung cancer (Yan et al., 2016), glioma (Du et al., 2014), astrocytoma (Jin et al., 2015, 2013), stroke (Cai et al., 2017a), and colorectal cancer (Li et al., 2016). Here, RTEL1 is linked to stroke disorder.