News Release

Is stroke prevention taking a back seat to stroke treatment?

Three-fourths of ER stroke cases had some degree of preventability, UCI survey finds

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of California - Irvine

Dr. Mark Fisher, University of California - Irvine

image: Dr. Mark Fisher is a professor of neurology. view more 

Credit: UC Irvine Health

Irvine, Calif., Dec. 9, 2015 -- Many strokes that required immediate treatment in emergency rooms may have been preventable, according to a University of California, Irvine study.

While therapy for acute stroke continues to advance and improve patient outcomes, the findings stress that stroke prevention - including the close monitoring of blood pressure, cholesterol levels and cardiac conditions - needs to keep pace. The work appears online in JAMA Neurology. Link to study: http://archneur.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2474503.

Using a prevention scale they developed for this study, UCI neurologist Dr. Mark Fisher and colleagues discovered that 76 percent of acute stroke patients exhibited some degree of stroke preventability, while 26 percent exhibited high preventability.

The results "point to an apparent paradox," Fisher said. "The recent breakthroughs in acute stroke therapy have led to massive efforts to streamline the evaluation of acute stroke patients and institute therapy as fast as feasible. These efforts will lead to more effective mitigation of brain injury consequent to acute ischemic stroke.

"However, our data suggest that the difficulties faced by acute stroke patients extend far beyond the rather narrow period of emergency stroke treatment. If one takes what could be characterized as a more holistic approach to the problem of stroke, there's a vast expansion of the window of intervention to include the very stroke prevention efforts that appear to be lacking in so many hyper-acute stroke patients."

He and colleagues reviewed records of 274 patients (mean age 67) discharged with a diagnosis of ischemic stroke from UC Irvine Medical Center between Dec. 2, 2010, and June 11, 2012, and evaluated the preventability of each person's stroke. Their 10-point scale focused on the effectiveness of treatment for hypertension (0-2 points), hyperlipidemia (0-2 points), atrial fibrillation (0-4 points), and the use of antithrombotic therapy for known prior cerebrovascular and cardiovascular disease (0-2) points.

Seventy-six percent of patients scored 1 or higher, and 26 percent scored 4 or more. This, Fisher said, points to one conclusion.

"Stroke preventability and stroke treatability are closely associated," he said. "This emphasizes the enduring importance of stroke prevention in an era of increasingly effective stroke treatment. These findings raise the question of whether resources for acute stroke treatment are being directed toward those patients whose strokes are, in fact, the most preventable."

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Annlia Paganini-Hill, Lisa Moores and Dr. Mohamad Alsharif of UCI contributed to the study, which was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (grant NS 20989).

About the University of California, Irvine: Currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities. The campus has produced three Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 30,000 students and offers 192 degree programs. It's located in one of the world's safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County's second-largest employer, contributing $4.8 billion annually to the local economy. For more on UCI, visit http://www.uci.edu.

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