According to the report of scientists, 25 per cent of patients who had clot-busting medications delivered directly into their blood clot within 6 hours of a stroke experienced a "miraculous" recovery within a day.
However, the route to accomplishing this "Lazarus Phenomenon" is still experimental and rather not probable to become frequent practice soon.
"This therapy of putting the medication directly into a clot is not an approved method," explained Dr Donald DiPette, chairman and professor of internal medicine at the Texas A&M Health Science Centre College of Medicine and Scott & White Hospital. "And it’s only very small research. It needs to be reproduced.
Not promptly applicable
"But the excitement is that this miracle occurs," DiPette added. "This research is of great importance. It worked, it provides us with more insight and proves that we can reverse stroke, nevertheless it’s not promptly applicable to everyone."
The results of the research were to be presented Thursday at the American Stroke Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco.
Nowadays, the only approved therapy for ischemic stroke is intravenous delivery of tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), the "clot buster," within 3 hours of the beginning of a stroke. Ischemic strokes, that result from blood clots, account for over eighty per cent of all strokes.
Greater risk of bleeding
The intra-arterial delivery of clot-busting medications directly into a clot using microcatheters increases the bleeding risk and is not FDA-approved. The Lazarus Phenomenon takes its name from Lazarus, who, in the New Testament, was raised from the dead by Christ.
The authors of the latest research, based at Ohio State University College of Medicine, were willing to find out what factors contributed to the Lazarus Phenomenon. Therefore, they collected data on 102 patients between the ages of 18 and 90 who had experienced an ischemic stroke and were treated with intra-arterial clot busters three to six hours after their stroke.
Almost one-quarter (24.5%) of the patients who developed the Lazarus Phenomenon, defined as at least a 50 per cent decrease in their National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale score 24 hours after treatment. The scale evaluates stroke impact based on the severity of each physical deficit, such as limb paralysis, vision loss or speech problems.
According to scientists, time-to-treatment had a more considerable influence on recovery than age, sex, blood sugar or blood pressure. Average time-to-treatment was 208 minutes for the patients who developed the Lazarus Phenomenon, in comparison to 306 minutes for those who did not.
It is probable that this technique would be used only by specialized medical institutions. "This method is much more invasive and much more complicated to perform," DiPette explained.
Stroke frequently unnoticed
And getting to stroke victims in three to six hours is also complicated, particularly in light of another research that is being presented at the San Francisco meeting that discovered that fifty per cent of people are not able to identify the symptoms of a stroke.
"The sooner you did this, the more successful it was, so within 3 hours of the first symptom," DiPette explained. "That’s a short spell of time. Getting to an institution that can do this within 3 hours is going to be challenging."
However, even these restrictions do not decrease the final promise of the findings.
"It is exciting, however, due to the fact that we’ve never done any research like this before in stroke," DiPette stated. "Now we have some early suggestion that we can in fact influence stroke, just like we can affect heart attack. There is hope. With continued study, we might be able to reverse an severe stroke."
