Going into the blocked artery of someone who is having a stroke to remove the clot is more likely to produce a good recovery than treatment with just clot-busting drugs, according to a study
December 17, 2014
By Gene Emery
Reuters Health - Going into the blocked artery of someone who is having a stroke to remove the clot is more likely to produce a good recovery than treatment with just clot-busting drugs, according to a study of 500 patients in the Netherlands.
"Catching the clot and fishing it out of the blocked artery to reopen it makes a big difference in outcome," Dr. Jeffrey Saver, a director of the University of California Los Angeles Stroke Center, told Reuters Health. The devices to retrieve clots have been around for a while but until now we hadn't had a clinical trial showing that they made patients better."
Ninety days after their strokes, 32.6 percent of patients whose treatment included going into a brain artery to remove a clot achieved functional independence, compared to 19.1 percent given only usual care with clot-dissolving drugs.
The study, known as MR CLEAN and published online Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, applies to patients whose strokes were the result of a blockage in the large forward arteries of the brain. But that's the most common type of stroke, and the findings could affect up to 125,000 patients in the U.S. and 90,000 in Europe each year.
"We're talking about the sickest stroke patients, the ones with blockages of their main arteries leading to the brain, and these patients account for the majority of disability and death related to stroke," study coauthor Dr. Albert J. Yoo, director of Acute Stroke Intervention at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told Reuters Health by phone.
Dr. Saver, who was not involved in the study, said the findings should give people an even stronger reason to get someone to the hospital as quickly as possible if they demonstrate stroke symptoms, such as facial drooping, arm weakness or speech difficulties.
"Stroke is now an even more treatable disease today than it was yesterday," he said, citing the availability in some centers of the clot-extracting devices that can be used in combination with clot-dissolving drugs. "But we can only use them if patients get to the hospital in time."
Read the original post:
Clot-Grabbing Devices Offer Better Outcomes for Stroke Patients than Drugs