January 14, 2015 – Stroke Treatment

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Anchor lead:  Using medications and removing clots helps many with strokes, Elizabeth Tracey reports

The blood clot-busting drug called TPA is known to help people with strokes due to clots recover much better, but sometimes clots are stubborn and just won’t dissolve.  Now Steven Zeiler, a stroke expert at Johns Hopkins, describes a study where clots were physically removed from the brains of people who had strokes.

Zeiler: They took patients who received the standard IV TPA drug, and then randomized them to what you would normally do which is manage their blood pressure, manage their temperature, manage their diabetes, or randomize them to that catheter-based technique.  These are patients that did not get better after getting the IV TPA, and then they either got a catheter or got no catheter, and the patients that got a catheter-based technique did better.   :29

Zeiler applauds the investigators in this study for their careful study design and says any intervention that improves stroke outcomes should be considered.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.