“…Of these, 7 papers reported risks in older patients but did not compare their results to younger patients in the same centre(s) and were therefore excluded. Among the 62 remaining eligible papers [35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97], there were no differences in the associations between either age or sex and overall 30-day stroke rate, death rate or combined stroke and death rate between studies reporting the associations as their primary aim and those which reported them as a subanalysis along with other risk factors (fig. 1, 2) and so data from both types of study are combined in the analyses below.…”