News 12 This Morning/ Wednesday, August 5th, 2012
AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Stroke is the leading cause of death in the United States according to the CDC. Strokes can affect anyone and right now there is only one type of stroke therapy approved by the FDA.
Researchers at Georgia Health Sciences University are trying to change that with a new experimental type of stroke therapy.
Right now TPA is the drug approved by the FDA for stroke therapy, but researchers say that doing something as simple as compressing your leg could help reduce the stroke size and damage by about 50%.
Robert Sapp, 60, had a stroke Tuesday morning. "I got up and I couldn't breathe," he said. "I lost my equilibrium. Fell in the kitchen and my wife heard me."
He was able to get to the hospital near his home in Dublin quickly receiving treatment from Dr. David Hess at GHSU through telestroke.
"They called me about 5 in the morning [and] I got on. We have a telestroke system that's Internet based so I went to my porch, saw him, saw his scan, talked to him and talked to the doctors and we gave TPA," said Dr. Hess, Chairman of the Department of Neurology at GHSU.
TPA is the only approved stroke therapy, but can only be used in specific cases within a specific amount of time.
"Less than 5 % of people in the United States with stroke get TPA," said Dr. Hess.
So he is working on a new type of therapy using something as simple as a blood pressure cuff to compress the leg.
Original post:
Experimental stroke therapy could reduce size, damage by 50%