Dykstra-Aiello et al. (2016) collected whole blood RNA samples from 266 patients with ischemic stroke and evaluated the expression of lncRNAs in these samples. They found the differentially expressed lncRNAs between ischemic stroke patients and controls, which suggests that lncRNAs have enormous potential to be used as novel clinical biomarkers for stroke (Dykstra-Aiello et al., 2016). More interestingly, Wang et al. (2017a) found that lncRNA H19 gene mutations increase the risk of ischemic stroke. Here, H19 is linked to ischemic stroke.