CHI3L1 and Hypertension: Hypertension has the potential to cause damage to the cerebral microcirculation, decrease cerebral blood flow, and subsequently lead to ischemia, initiating a neuroinflammatory cascade (Snyder et al., 2017) that involves the activation of astrocytes and microglia, which release YKL-40 (Bonneh-Barkay et al., 2010) and sTREM2 (Brendel et al., 2017) as part of the tissue repair process.