AHA/ASA Stroke Council member and volunteer expert, Joseph Broderick, M.D., offers perspective (via Zoom) on ISC 20 presentations 85 and 136. He is Director at the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute; Albert Barnes Voorheis Chair for the Department of Neurology at the UC College of Medicine; professor of Neurology at the University of Cincinnati.  
copyright American Heart Association 

"I think that one of the limitations of the first study is that it's small. And that the investigators state that it's related to, the gum disease is related to intracranial blockages of the artery but not in the neck. And, in actuality if you look at the numbers, the numbers are just too small. And there really isn't any difference. So for example, in the abstract, they talked about with intracranial disease an odds ratio of 3.1. But the odds ratio for the neck was not much different. It was like two point something. So, the actual percentages differences were about the same. And I suspect that if we have a relationship here, it's not limited just to brain arteries, but also the arteries that supply the brain that are in the neck. Because they're basically the same lining, the same kind of process. So, I don't think this is something unique necessarily to just brain arteries."