Ageing is one of the most significant risk factors for stroke which represents the major cause of death and disability worldwide. Approximately three-quarters of all strokes occur in people over the age of 65 and the risk of having a stroke doubles each decade after the age of 55. Various functional, chemical and structural changes occur in the brain during ageing and these changes may contribute to neurodegenerative disease (Mattson et al., 2002). Research in rodents has identified that the same ischemic insult is much more damaging to brain from older animals compared with young adults. In older animals the mechanism of injury is different and dependent predominately on glutamatergic excitotoxicity (Palmer, 2001). During an ischemic insult, extracellular glutamate level is increased as a result of impaired and /or reversed glutamate uptake mechanisms, which induces cell death via excessive activation of glutamate receptors. The enhanced role of excitotoxicity is probably attributable to the altered expression of glutamate transporters with ageing. The present project uses quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and immunohistochemistry to examine the changes in glutamate transporter in ageing individuals which might contribute to increased injury in elderly patients. Nine samples of cryo preserved human cerebella white matter from deceased non demented individuals aged between 47 years and 92 years were obtained from the Netherlands Brain Bank. Tissue was prepared for qRT-PCR and samples assayed using sybr green qRT-PCR reagents for the presence of EAAT1, 2, 3 and 4 mRNAs after Salter and Fern (2005). Immunohistochemistry on cryo sections was performed using specific antibodies to these transporters. This work has received ethical approval from the Netherlands Brain Bank, The University of Leeds ethical approval committee and Leeds NHS trust. We found transcript levels of EAAT1 to be high in all tissue samples and transcript levels of EAAT3 were low in all samples. However transcript levels of EAAT2 and EAAT4 show evidence of inverse correlation, where EAAT2 is high, EAAT4 is low and vice versa. For the donors aged 52 and 88 the difference between EAAT2 and 4 was not significant, in all other donors the difference was significant (P<0.05). We used immunohistochemistry to assay levels of these transporter subtypes in cerebella samples from the 47 year old and the 89 year old donor. We used fluorescence intensity on a number of randomly selected regions of interest to assess changes in the levels of EAAT1 and found there to be no significant difference. In our tissue samples there was no relationship between age and glutamate transporter subtype compliment. There was however some variability in the subtypes EAAT2 and EAAT4 and this warrants further investigation.