Deans' stroke musings: Vessel occlusion, penumbra, and reperfusion

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Vessel occlusion, penumbra, and reperfusion – translating theory to practice

Read it and weep, for our doctors still have no idea what is going on with stroke or how to treat it.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fneur.2014.00194/full?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&
Bruce C. V. Campbell^1,2*,

Geoffrey A. Donnan² and

Stephen M. Davis¹

¹Department of Medicine, Royal Melbourne Hospital, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
²Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

The management of ischemic stroke is at a critical juncture. Administration of intravenous tPA is currently restricted to within 4.5 h from stroke onset with several trials in longer time windows proving neutral (1, 2). Revascularization success with tPA in major vessel occlusion is widely recognized as suboptimal (3). Alternative thrombolytic agents with theoretical efficacy advantages such as tenecteplase and desmoteplase are yet to show benefit in phase 3 trials. The promise of endovascular therapy has also yet to translate into positive randomized trials (4–6), although a new generation of devices is currently being studied. While it is possible that these therapeutic approaches are simply ineffective, the heterogeneity of stroke pathophysiology is likely to be contributing to the neutral results we often observe.

Imaging selection has been proposed as a means of reducing heterogeneity by identifying patients with the potential to benefit from revascularization and therefore enhancing the probability of success in trials of new therapies. However, whether it is sufficient to demonstrate an occluded artery as the target or to also require evidence of salvageable downstream tissue has been debated. The recent announcement of neutral results in DIAS 3 (7), a trial that compared desmoteplase versus placebo 3–9 h after stroke onset in patients with vessel occlusion, without reference to downstream tissue status other than what was visible on non-contrast CT, will no doubt further stimulate this discussion. It is, therefore, salient to consider the current methods to identify salvageable ischemic penumbra and the potential value of commonly used surrogates for clinical outcome, chiefly reperfusion, recanalization, and infarct growth.