Long-awaited stroke studies show hopeful new treatment no better than older one

I have to keep posting about this because it just shows how little stroke leaders know about stroke and its fallout.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/long-awaited-stroke-studies-show-hopeful-new-treatment-no-better-than-older-one/2013/02/08/cf3b90f4-7142-11e2-ac36-3d8d9dcaa2e2_story.html?wprss=rss_national&tid=pp_widget
Three long-awaited studies have shown that mechanically removing a blood clot from a stroke patient’s brain is no more useful than the older treatment of giving an IV dose of a clot-dissolving drug to the whole body.
The results of the clinical trials, presented this week at a meeting in Hawaii, shocked and surprised stroke physicians. Many had already adopted the more aggressive strategy over the last decade.

New technology helps doctors tailor treatment by linking a patient’s location to outbreaks of illness.

“For the stroke field this is a really big deal,” Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said of the findings, which were presented over three days at the International Stroke Conference in Hono­lulu.
NINDS paid for two of the trials, one of which cost $27 million. One study took eight years to complete because it was so difficult to enroll patients willing to take the chance they’d be randomly assigned to get the older treatment.

I could have told them for free that the trial wasn't going to work.  You first would need to set up an experiment that would determine exactly how long neurons can be deprived of oxygen and still not be damaged. That answer would tell you how fast you would need to deliver tPA or pull out the clot.  I bet the answer is less than a minute.