Stroke Treatment Via Telephone Works for Rural Patients

Ivanhoe Newswire
Thursday, April 26, 2007; 12:00 AM

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Lifesaving help for stroke patients living in rural areas may be just a phone call away.

New research from the University of Kentucky Medical Center shows stroke patients in rural hospitals can get safe, effective clot-busting treatment when a doctor from a larger hospital is on the phone guiding the treatment.

The study looked at the outcomes of 121 stroke patients treated with the drug tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) at a rural community hospital by a stroke neurologist who was guiding the treatment via telephone. tPA must be given within three hours of a stroke to be effective.

Results show it took an average of 132 minutes from the onset of a stroke to the beginning of the phone-guided tPA treatment at a rural community hospital -- less than the average 144 minutes from stroke onset to tPA treatment in the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) tPA study published in 1995.

Researchers in this new study also found lower rates of bleeding in the brain and death than in the original NINDS study -- 2.5 percent of rural patients treated by telephone had symptomatic bleeding in the brain compared to 6.4 percent in the NINDS study; 7.5 percent in the rural study died compared to 17 percent of patients in the NINDS study. And nearly half of rural patients treated with the telephone-guided tPA treatment went home after an average hospital stay of four days.

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SOURCE: American Academy of Neurology's 59th Annual Meeting in Boston, April 28-May 5, 2007