WEDNESDAY, April 25, 2007 (HealthDay News) -- Stroke patients in rural hospitals can receive safe, effective treatment with a clot-busting drug when an expert from a larger hospital guides the therapy over the telephone, U.S. research confirms.
"Expert guidance of this treatment over the telephone appears to be safe, practical and effective," study author Dr. Anand Vaishnav, of the University of Kentucky Medical Center in Lexington, said in a prepared statement.
His team was slated to present the findings this week at the American Academy of Neurology's annual meeting, in Boston.
The study included 121 ischemic stroke patients treated with the clot-busting drug tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) at a rural community hospital. Treatment was guided via phone by a stroke neurologist from a larger center.
To be effective, tPA must be given within three hours of a stroke. On average, the patients in this study started receiving tPA therapy within 132 minutes of stroke onset.
"This is less time than the average 144 minutes it took from stroke onset to tPA treatment in the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) tPA study, which was a large national study published in 1995. We also had lower rates of bleeding in the brain and death than the original NINDS study," Vaishnav said.
In the original NINDS study, 6.4 percent of patients had symptomatic bleeding n the brain, compared with 2.5 percent of the rural patients in this study. The patient death rate in the NINDS study was 17 percent, compared with 7.5 percent in this new study.
More information
The American Heart Association has more about tPA.
