Endovascular therapy (EVT) presents a good chance of saving stroke patients’ lives, but because the treatment is not available at every hospital, many patients must transfer hospitals before they can receive this chance. New research published in Circulation indicates that stroke patients who undergo interhospital transfer experience longer delays before receiving endovascular therapy and have worse outcomes.
The article, authored by the DCRI’s Shreyansh Shah, MD, and Ying Xian, MD, PhD, examined data from the American Heart Association’s Get With the Guidelines-Stroke registry, which includes ischemic stroke patients from more than 2,000 hospitals across the U.S.
The team found that between 2012 and 2017, almost 43 percent of the 37,620 patients who received EVT received the treatment after transferring hospitals. Because EVT, also known as mechanical thrombectomy, requires a trained person to administer the treatment as well as special equipment, not every hospital has the capacity to offer the treatment. However, referral rates for EVT continued to rise throughout the study period, which Xian said is because strong evidence supporting the efficacy of EVT was published in 2015.
Read complete article at DCRI News