For stroke cases with shorter onset time, the HTRA1 methylation and stroke-related variables showed increasing discriminatory power for differentiating stroke cases from healthy controls (area under the curve (AUC) = 0.66, 0.72 and 0.72 for stroke cases with onset time < 2 years, ≤ 1.5 years and ≤ 1.32 years, respectively, Fig. 3A–C). Here, HTRA1 is linked to Stroke.