Positive news for new stroke treatment - clot removal

There's promising news that there's more than one way to battle a clot-related stroke. Maybe, in some circumstances, better than current medical treatment.

Read here about a study showing how clot removal proves mettle in large-vessel strokes:

Survival with little or no disability as measured by a modified Rankin score of no more than 2 occurred in 32.6% of patients who got intra-arterial treatment compared with 19.1% who got medical treatment alone, they reported online in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The intra-arterial treatments used were predominantly retrievable stents (82%) atop IV thrombolytics (87%), with the rest largely accounted for by additional thrombolytics given directly into the affected artery.

Mortality came out similar between groups, and there was no excess risk of symptomatic intracranial hemorrhage with the interventional strategy in the trial.

A Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery release called it the "most significant stroke treatment clinical trial since NINDS-2," which led to approval of IV tissue plasminogen activator (tPA).

So, here's some new information that might give even more hope to stroke patients, with better potential outcome and less disability. Worth keeping a watch on this one.