Stroke – Latest Research

Transcript

The latest research on stroke has actually probably revolved around the intraarterial treatment or your interventional treatment of stroke. Although there’s a few areas we can talk about. With respect to interarterial treatment of stroke, this is one of those things where, generally speaking, we’ve always thought of ourselves as sort of, you know, slightly behind cardiologists. Cardiologists had been putting stents in the heart and doing interventions angioplasties and the heart for years and years and the type of clot that occurs in the hear,t at least bear some similarity to the brain. So we’ve always thought that we could do that, but we’ve had a hard time really proving that that’s been effective for stroke. In the last month there’s been an important randomized control study that’s come out called Mr. Clean that’s shown that intraarterial treatment plus IVTPA may be more effective than just TPA in some patients. This is very exciting for us. And the research has sort of really tended to sort of go along those lines with respect to better devices. So if trying to find the right device, and it’s been interesting as we’ve looked through the different devices that we’ve used for interventional treatment of stroke, it started off with just intraarterial tpa trying to just give tpa directly to the spot and then came along something called the mercy retriever. And the mercy retriever is literally, it’s a corkscrew. I mean, the, the legend is that someone was using, you know, of course grew on a wine bottle. I thought, wait a minute. And so, you know, you of course, grew into the clot and try to retrieve it. Then came something called a device where you actually poke the clot and suction it out. And then came the stent treavers and the notion is that the next step beyond that, it’s coming.