Stroke – tPA Latest Research

Transcript

On top of that, we’re always looking for other ways to more quickly detect stroke, to get someone tpa faster. And one of the really neat things that’s been coming out there, and it’s still too early for primetime, but it’s coming out, are our actual ambulances with a cat scan in the ambulance. So if someone has a stroke, the paramedics are trained to recognize what a stroke looks like, get someone in the, in the ambulance can actually do a CT scan in the ambulance and then more quickly give them IV TPA in the field rather than having them come into the hospital. So that’s a future direction that we may be moving into as well. And then another area that’s been an interesting area, it has been some type of neuroprotection trying to find something that can protect the brain, uh, because often the big problem for us is time is, you know, the time it takes someone to get into the hospital time it takes them to get evaluated in the hospital and then get the tpa going. And if there’s something that we can give them to help protect their brain during this whole evaluation, that would be really, really wonderful. One last area is trying to look at how we can make IV TPA more effective. And an interesting thing that’s been researched and continuing to be researched is using ultrasound to try to augment the TPA. And the idea is if you can locate where the clot is in the artery, you can actually put a device over the skin that’s sending ultrasound waves where the clot is, so that as the tpa hits the clot, it can warm into the clot better and break it up more effectively. And so that’s another area that’s being actively researched that’s exciting.