Researchers have developed a device, which traps blood clots so they can be removed safely from the brain, could be a revolutionary new treatment for stroke patients. The cage-like gadget called as the Solitaire Flow Restoration Device entangles the clot and allows doctors to retrieve it so blood flow can be restored swiftly.
Nearly eighty-five percent of stroke victims are affected by ischaemic strokes, where a clot travels to the brain and locks up its blood supply. The remaining stroke victims suffer haemorrhagic strokes, where a blood vessel bursts in the brain, causing potentially lethal bleeding. In existing treatment patients are treated with clot-removing drugs known as tissue plasminogen activators.
However these drugs are only really effective within the first three hours after a stroke, and after that a clot may be too hard and well-developed to disintegrate with drugs. But the new Solitaire Flow Restoration Device, could possibly be used long after three hours cut-off point as it may vigor its way although the clot.
Firstly a tiny tube is inserted into an artery in the leg with the help of X-ray images, fed up through the body until it reaches the clot. A collapsible metal cage attached at the end of the tube is forced through the centre of the blockage and then sprung open at the push of a button.
The cage instantaneously gets bigger, entrapping the clot in its metal frame. Then doctors slowly pull the loaded cage until the clot is safely drawn into the tube, prior to being detached from the body. In recent years, similar clot-busting device has been developed, but most of them tend to smash the clot into pieces before retrieving them.
This increases the risk that fragments of the clot could travel deeper into the brain and merely cause another blockage which may be even harder to reach. The Solitaire Flow Restoration Device avoids this risk by extracting the clot in one go. The new device was compared with a clot-busting machine called the Merci retriever, already approved for use by FDA.
This device uses a corkscrew-shaped tip to drill into the blockage before removing it. The results of a study involving more than one hundred patients showed that the Solitaire successfully restored blood flow in sixty-one percent of patients, in comparison to just twenty-four percent for the Merci retriever.
Professor Kennedy Lees, an expert in stroke treatment from Glasgow University, stated the Solitaire device looked promising, it is potentially very useful but it needs to be fully tested because it may be that restoring blood flow so late on has no clinical benefit. In addition, these devices do carry some risk of bleeding if they cause injury to the blood vessels.