A new clot busting drug seems to improve the prospect of recovery for stroke victims.
The new treatment combines minimally invasive surgery, a brain imaging
technique and a clot-busting drug 't-PA', according to a multi-centre
clinical trial led by Johns Hopkins researchers.
The novel treatment was developed for patients with intracerebral
haemorrhage (ICH), a bleed in the brain that causes a clot to form
within brain tissue, which can cause irreversible brain damage, often
leading to death or extreme disability.
The usual treatments for ICH - either general supportive care such as
blood pressure control and ventilation, or invasive surgeries that
involve taking off portions of the skull to remove the clot - have
similar mortality rates, ranging from 30 to 80 percent depending on the
size of the clot.
Daniel Hanley, professor of neurology, Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine, and colleagues developed and tested the new
treatment on 60 ICH patients at 12 hospitals in US, Canada, Britain and
Germany, according to a Johns Hopkins statement.
They compared their results to those of 11 patients who received only
supportive care. After neurologists diagnosed ICH patients at these
hospitals, surgeons drilled dime-sized holes in patients' skulls close
to the clot location.
Using high-tech neuro-navigational software that provides detailed
brain images, the physicians threaded tubes through the holes and
directly into the clots. They used these tubes to drip t-PA into the
clot for up to three days in two doses, every eight hours.
They found that clot size in patients treated with either dose
shrunk by more than half, compared to only one percent in patients who
received only supportive care.
Those in the treatment group and the supportive care group had about a
10 percent mortality rate at 30 days after treatment, lower than the
typically high mortality rates expected for this condition.
These findings were given in detail for the first time at the European Stroke Conference in Hamburg. IANS
