In addition, significant risk factors related to the CIMT-WMH association (Table 4) included older age (Della-Morte et al., 2018), migraine and depressed patients with WMH (Kocatürk and Kocatürk, 2020), hypertension (Chen et al., 2019), Hispanic ethnicity (Della-Morte et al., 2018), and the presence of apolipoprotein E (APOE) ɛ4 allele in postmenopausal women (Thurston et al., 2023). Here, APOE is linked to hypertensive disorder.