VEGFA and ischemic stroke: The current results demonstrating concurrent improvements in angiogenesis, motor activity, infarct sizes, and the quantity of surviving peri-infarct neurons parallel previous studies that highlight how treadmill exercise regimens increase angiogenesis in ischemic stroke animals (Tang et al. 2018; Gao et al. 2014), and show the crucial role of angiogenesis and the VEGF signaling pathway in rendering exercise-induced behavioral and histological benefits against ischemic stroke (Chen et al. 2019; Xie et al. 2019).