AHA/ASA volunteer expert Karen Furie M.D. offers perspective (via Skype) on ISC 19 abstract WMP86.  She is chief of neurology at Rhode Island Hospital, The Miriam Hospital and Bradley Hospital, and serves as chair of the Department of Neurology at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown in Providence, RI.
copyright American Heart Association 

"In this study, while they looked at women who had high blood pressure and those who did not, they found that this factor, the infection during delivery, seemed to be an important independent risk factor for stroke. Having said that, this an extraordinarily rare complication. Of the pregnancies they looked at, it was .006% of the pregnancies. So women should not be overly concerned about this. It does, of course, raise questions about why this association might exist. So for one, any type of an infectious process in the body can cause inflammation and may set a woman up for an increased risk of thrombosis, particularly in veins. And clots in veins can cause both ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke. So that's one possibility. Another possibility is that there are factors that are associated with getting the infection in the first place. There may be issues around comorbidities, prenatal care, factors associated with lifestyle or medical conditions that predated the delivery that might also increase risk in that postpartum period. So while this study identifies a signal, there's clearly more work to be done in order to better understand the relationship and potentially identify factors that are modifiable in the period before delivery."