Stroke patients lose a month of disability-free life for each 15-minute delay in seeking help and getting treatment. But a clot-busting drug called tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, can help these stroke victims gain back this time, reports show.
Diane Barbeler, 66, who had a stroke last Monday, walked out of the hospital the next day with only minor sensory changes in her right hand and foot. The quick recovery, according to neurologist Atte Meretoja, who helped diagnose her stroke at Australia's Royal Melbourne Hospital, is because Barbeler received tPA within 3 hours of losing strength and control in her lower limb.
"The main delay in stroke is due to people not calling for help," Meretoja, the study's lead author and an associate professor of medicine at the University of Melbourne, told Bloomberg. "We have now demonstrated that this is very harmful, and people lose on average a month of life for every 15 minutes they wait at home hoping that the symptoms will go away."
Stroke is the fourth most common cause of death in the United States, and the number one cause of disability. It occurs when blood cannot get to the brain, causing brain cells to die within minutes, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Ischemic stroke, which accounts for about 87 percent of cases, is caused by a blood clot.
Stroke services in Helsinki and Melbourne are among the fastest, taking 20 minutes from the patient's arrival at the hospital to start tPA treatment. But most other stroke facilities, including those in the United States, take 70 to 80 minutes.
Based on evidence from trials of clot-busting drugs applied to 2,258 stroke patients in Australia and Finland, speeding up tPA treatment by just one minute adds another 1.8 days of healthy life.
tPA should be given within 4 and a half hours of the onset of stroke symptoms, according to the American Stroke Association. Symptoms include sudden numbness of the leg, arm or face, confusion, problems with vision, abrupt severe headache, dizziness, loss of balance or trouble walking. The American Stroke Association urges anyone showing signs of these symptoms to immediately call emergency services.
