The treatment of acute ischemic stroke, the kind caused by a blood clot, has come a long way in recent years thanks to two major innovations: a drug called Tissue Plasminogen Activator (TPA), that can dissolve blood clots; and a minimally invasive procedure that allows surgeons to actually remove the clot.
TPA is routinely used in emergency rooms across the country with great success. To be effective, however, it must be used within the first three hours of symptom onset and it is not always effective in dealing with larger blood clots.
Here is where neurosurgeons and neuro-interventionalists like our own Dr. Dorothea Altschul have begun to use a new generation of 3D devices to actually remove the offending blood clot. They use incredibly small instruments and complicated computer and X-ray guidance to navigate these tiny instruments to the brain, usually through a small incision in the patient’s leg.
Once such device, the Penumbra System, is in phase four of a clinical trial called The THERAPY Trial: The Randomized, Concurrent Controlled Trial to Assess the Penumbra System’s Safety and Effectiveness in the Treatment of Acute Stroke. The trial is taking place in medical centers across the country.
Dr. Altschul is currently the leading investigator for the THERAPY trial in the Northeast. She is the Primary Investigator at both St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center and The Valley Hospital and recently, she was the first physician in the tri-state area to utilize the device with a patient as part of the trial. “It opened the clogged-up artery in one pass and the patient is doing well,” says Dr. Altschul.
