It’s been an interesting year for stroke research and, in honour of stroke week, I’m devoting a short blog post to some of the developments in stroke research this year.
Probably the biggest breakthrough this year unfortunately came a few months too late for Mum. That was research looking at combining clot-busting drugs and scans with endovascular (inside blood cells) therapy using a stent.
When ischaemic stroke patients like Mum first have their strokes they’re treated with Tissue Plasminogen Activator (tPA). The drug (known colloquially as a “clot buster”) works by dissolving the clot and needs to be administered within 3 hours. As we all know, in Mum’s case the clot was simply too large to be dissolved by the tPA and resulted in considerable damage to her right hemisphere as it was deprived of oxygen.
Combining clot-busting drugs with clot removal significantly improved the number of people who walked away from a hospital after a major ischaemic stroke who may otherwise have experienced disability.
Dr Bruce Campbell, a neurologist at Royal Melbourne Hospital, who led the study, was quoted in Medscape Medical News as saying that, “In our study 40% of patients had a good outcome with tPA alone. This was almost doubled when endovascular therapy was added in.”
Dr Campbell was also quoted in an AM story on the study as saying, “One of the key features about our study was the use of advanced brain imaging to actually look into the patient’s brain and see which parts were already irreversibly damaged that we couldn’t save, versus how much was actually salvageable if we can get the artery open quickly – and that is a major difference between our trial and many of the other trials.”
New stroke treatment technique doubles chances of recovery (ABC’s AM programme)
EXTEND-IA: ‘Huge’ Benefit of Endovascular Therapy for Stroke (viewing Medscape articles requires signing up for a free membership)
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