![]() (The retriever manufacturer, Medtronic, provided support for the studies. Approved by the FDA in 2012, the stent retriever got a boost this year when the journal Stroke reported data showing many more patients treated with a retriever resumed normal life than did patients who received tPA. “It's the first proven, effective treatment for acute stroke in a generation,” says Jeffrey Saver, director of the Stroke Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. One innovation, a tiny wire device called a stent retriever, can be snaked up into the blood vessels leading to the brain to pull out large clots. Recently doctors and scientists have broken this long-standing clinical stalemate with new tools to put a dent in those grim numbers. Sadly, there have been no good alternatives to tPA since it debuted. It needs to be administered within three hours of symptom onset, does not last long in the body before it loses effectiveness, can cause uncontrolled bleeding and often fails to break up large clots.įor many of the nearly 800,000 Americans who every year suffer ischemic strokes, as the brain blockages are called, these shortcomings can be deadly. ![]() But like so many medical marvels, tPA (which stands for tissue plasminogen activator) has turned out to have serious limitations. ![]() Food and Drug Administration for treating strokes caused by clots that block blood flow to the brain. TPA was the first and is still the only medicine approved by the U.S. It was hailed as a lifesaver and has proved to be one for hundreds of thousands of patients since. Twenty years ago stroke doctors celebrated the arrival of a powerful new weapon: the clot-clearing drug tPA.
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