Recent years have seen a large number of studies that investigated the association between various microbial agents causing chronic infectious diseases and stroke or myocardial infarction. This research was driven by the fact that the traditional stroke risk factors are not sufficient to explain the total burden of stroke in populations.1 Inflammatory parameters such as C-reactive protein level and leukocyte count are among those “new” risk factors that are presently under discussion and chronic infectious diseases are interesting candidates to explain the association between inflammatory indexes and stroke risk.