Triage of Emergent Large Vessel Occlusion (ELVO) patients directly to Comprehensive Stroke Centers (CSCs) is good practice and benefits patients in Urban and Suburban population Centers - New insights from the TRIAGE-STROKE and RACECAT studies

In 2013, three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing the interventional management of stroke with intravenous (IV) thrombolytic therapy were simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine.1–3 These trials showed neither benefit nor harm associated with endovascular stroke therapies and the widespread interpretation of their collective results can be summarized with the blanket statement that "thrombectomy is not effective for the treatment of stroke". However, the SWIFT and TREVO studies (published in 2012) had clearly demonstrated that the interventional approaches used in the three RCTs were vastly inferior to contemporary thrombectomy techniques.4 5 Although this new generation of highly effective reperfusion therapies had become widely available by the time the negative trials were published, guidelines derived from the three negative trials did not endorse thrombectomy for stroke, which led to a drastic reduction (and in some regions a...
Source: Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery - Category: Neurosurgery Authors: Tags: Editor ' s column Source Type: research