WEDNESDAY, Dec. 13, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Black Americans are less likely than whites to receive the best treatments for a stroke, even though they're more likely to suffer a stroke and die from one, a new study has found.
Black patients are less likely to receive tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), a powerful clot-busting drug that can restore blood flow to the brain following a stroke, researchers found.
They also are less likely to have the clot causing their stroke surgically removed, in a minimally invasive procedure called an endovascular thrombectomy (EVT), results show.
“As health care professionals, we are not doing a good enough job of getting these lifesaving treatments to these patients,” said lead researcher Delaney Metcalf, a third-year medical student in the Augusta University/University of Georgia Medical Partnership.
Those two options are the go-to medical treatments for strokes caused by blood clots, and can dramatically reduce death and minimize the long-term impact of a stroke, researchers said.
To see how often they are used in Black stroke patients, researchers analyzed data from more than 89,000 stroke patients across the United States.
Both tPA and EVT are extremely time-sensitive options, the researchers noted. To be effective, tPA should be administered within a few hours of a stroke and EVT within about six hours.
Previous research has shown that Black patients are less likely to call emergency services for an ambulance, which can delay their medical care, researchers noted.
But even after arrival at a hospital, Black patients experience longer wait times before they get the brain imaging they need to receive either tPA or EVT, researchers found.
“Why is that? It could be that the hospital is really overrun and doesn’t have the staff to be able to do it in a timely manner,” Metcalf said. “There can also be implicit racial biases that lead to health professionals not treating their Black patients the same way they treat their white patients and not taking minority patients’ symptoms seriously.”
As a result, researchers found that even when Black patients get either procedure, they have substantially longer hospital stays than whites – signifying poorer health outcomes or a lower quality of care.
Why the gap? The hospital where the patient has been sent might not have the staff, medicine or equipment that would allow this gold-standard care, the researchers reasoned.
“This is a problem, but it’s a targetable problem,” Metcalf said. “There are many small things we can do to make advances in minority stroke care.”
“Increasing community education on recognizing stroke symptoms may help patients get to treatment centers faster,” Metcalf added. “Additionally, providing the training and technology needed for these treatments to underserved areas can improve access to stroke care.”
The new study was published in the December issue of the Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Diseases.
More information
The American Stroke Association has more about Black Americans and stroke.
SOURCE: University of Georgia, news release, Dec. 13, 2023
