Stroke Treatment & Prevention

Dr. Nina Solenski: Hi, I am Nina Solenski. I am one of the Stroke Neurologists here at the University of Virginia Health System. We will be talking about stroke treatments. Host: Are there surgical procedures for the prevention or treatment of strokes?

Dr. Nina Solenski: There are some very important procedures that we can do to prevent stroke. One of them has to do with a surgery to actually remove what we call plague or a cholesterol build up in the blood vessels, particularly again, in the clotted artery as one example, that has been proven to really affect the outcome overtime. The second thing - the second procedure that we can do have to do with not necessarily surgery, but actually, interventional procedures meaning, that we can actually similar to what we do to the heart, put in a balloon to be able to open up the blood vessels and then put in a narrow tube known as a stent to keep it open. Some of those are in trials right now to see which is better. Is surgery better or are the stents better? Those are very important questions and hopefully, we will have the answers to many of those clinical trials over the next year or two. Those are probably two of the most important procedures that we have. Right now there are two devices that we use usually in the acute setting when someone is having a stroke which has been approved by the food and drug administration. These are devices that actually retrieve the clot or disrupt the clot and remove the clot. They are not without risk and have to be applied in the right patient but they are out there and they are as I mentioned, FDA approved for that use.