Dr. Athos Patsalides, a member of the Standards and Guidelines Committee of the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery, has co-authored a paper establishing a new standard of care for patients suffering from acute ischemic stroke with a blockage in a major blood vessel.
The committee, which had been charged with evaluating and summarizing the latest research into endovascular treatments for stroke, looked at the increasingly compelling evidence that embolectomy (the removal of the clot) improves outcomes for patients with “emergent large vessel occlusion,” or ELVO. The paper defines ELVO as acute ischemic stroke with occlusion of a major intracranial vessel, such as the internal carotid artery (ICA), middle cerebral artery (MCA), or basilar artery. This condition usually results in poor outcomes, with significant rates of long-term disability even when treated with the clot-busting drug tPA.
Recent clinical trials comparing the drug treatment alone to the drug plus embolectomy have shown improved outcomes for those receiving the interventional procedure. This paper, published in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery, establishes new treatment standards based on these recent trials, with an emphasis on timely identification of patients whose condition warrants the use of both tPA and embolectomy.
An abstract of the paper can be found here
See also: New Evidence Supports Use of Interventional Embolectomy for Stroke
