By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter
WEDNESDAY, Feb. 11, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- More community hospitals are giving a powerful clot-busting medication to stroke victims, improving their chances of survival and recovery, new research shows.
These local hospitals are becoming more comfortable using the clot-busting drug tPA (tissue-plasminogen activator) due to a new treatment scheme known as "drip and ship," said study author Dr. Kevin Sheth, chief of the neurocritical care and emergency neurology division at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.
"Drip and ship" means that front-line hospitals quickly administer tPA to people suffering a stroke due to a blood clot in the brain, and then immediately transport them to a more advanced medical center with better stroke treatment facilities, Sheth explained.
Sheth's study revealed that one in four stroke patients who received tPA did so under the "drip and ship" method, indicating that more local hospitals are now administering the clot-buster.
"The real goal is to get tPA to every eligible patient," Sheth said. "Clearly, 'drip and ship' has become a common practice and one that is facilitating tPA use."
The findings are to be presented Wednesday at the American Stroke Association annual meeting in Nashville, and they will be published simultaneously in the journal Stroke.
Treatment guidelines call for stroke patients to receive tPA as quickly as possible, if their stroke is caused by a blood clot (an "ischemic" stroke).
It's the only FDA-approved clot-busting drug for stroke treatment, and is so valuable that the American Stroke Association refers to it as the "Gold Standard." Ideally, patients should receive the drug within three hours of the beginning of a stroke, the researchers said.
"Time lost is brain lost in acute stroke," said Dr. Jeffrey Saver, director of the UCLA Comprehensive Stroke Center and a spokesman for the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association. Saver noted that 2 million brain cells die every minute in which blood does not flow to the brain.
Original post:
More Stroke Patients Getting Clot-Buster Quickly, Study Shows