Baptist Jacksonville expands hope for stroke patients

Clinical stroke trials at the Stroke & Cerebrovascular Center at Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville are giving new hope to people who otherwise were past the window for minimally invasive treatment.

About 795,000 Americans each year suffer a new or recurrent stroke, according to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association. On average, a stroke occurs every 40 seconds and is the No. 5 cause of death taking nearly 129,000 lives a year. Stroke is also the leading cause of long-term disability.

Two new trials, DAWN and POSITIVE, hope to reduce those numbers by giving ischemic stroke patients, who can't get the clot buster drug medication tPA or who do not get better with this drug, the opportunity to have endovascular intervention. Neurovascular surgeons can use a stent retriever device, which is a hollow metal tube made of Nitinol wire mesh like a stent, to remove the blood clot. The device can go into the blood vessel through the groin up to the brain to unblock the vessel.

Currently, the standard of care for interventional treatment is within six hours after the start of stroke symptoms. The DAWN trial goes beyond that window by looking at using the retriever between six and 24 hours.

The POSITIVE trial also uses devices and medications approved by the FDA for opening clotted blood vessels, but looks at going up to 12 hours after symptoms first began. Patients are selected based on special advanced imaging that is new to Baptist and shows how much of the brain is still viable.

Ricardo Hanel, MD, PhD, director of the Baptist Neurological Institute at Baptist Jacksonville, said the two trials are particularly beneficial for people who wake up with a stroke and do not know when the symptoms first occurred. Clot buster medication is also not an option since the medication must be provided within 4.5 hours of symptoms occurring to be effective, Dr. Hanel said.

Baptist Health has more than 20 clinical trials for stroke and aneurysms and in many cases are the only ones in the region offering the trial.

"Having clinical trials ongoing allows us to be on the cutting edge of new concepts, techniques and technologies," said Dr. Hanel, who is also the primary international investigator on some of the trials. "What it means for the patient is they have first-hand access to what are the latest and potentially the greatest technology before anyone else in the country."

"Through our clinical trials, someone who has a stroke in our community has access to treatments that are potentially very impactful for preservation of their quality of life. The clinical trials also help define the new frontier of stroke treatment," added Eric Sauvageau, MD, director of the Stroke & Cerebrovascular Center at Baptist Jacksonville.

For more information on Baptist Health's services for stroke and aneurysms and clinical trials, go to baptistjax.com/stroke.