If you are a stroke sufferer you can take advantage of a clot-busting drug even if you take it about an hour after you feel the symptoms, researchers say.

The results of the study that suggested this have the potential to broaden treatment to a larger number of people each year and prevent many others from suffering a stroke which could leave them disabled and in need of rehabilitation. Nevertheless, these conclusions doesn’t mean that stroke victims shouldn’t seek help the moment they suddenly experience problems with sensation or feel weakness in the face, arms or legs. One should take the matter seriously because there is no kidding around with something like this.

The clot-busting stroke medicine has received the FDA approval in 1987 for preventing permanent heart damage immediately after a heart attack. Known as tPA, it helps the body chew up the clot. The drug is also given to enhance recovery and reduce the chance of disability in patients after they first notice stroke symptoms.

Tissue plasminogen activator is actually a protein, which works on the clotting system. This is why tPA, marketed by Boehringer Ingelheim – the company that funded the study, is used in clinical medicine to treat stroke.

The European study, which has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that the medicine can be administered with positive effects up to 4.5 hours after the stroke symptoms start. This is beyond the current three-hour window after the onset of the symptoms.

Usually, a stroke happens when a blood vessel that brings oxygen and nutrients to the brain either bursts or becomes blocked. The brain isn’t able anymore to store oxygen and to get the blood it needs. Therefore, the nerve cells in the affected part of the brain are not capable anymore of working as they should and die in three to four minutes. Thus, the part of the body they control is affected and can’t function either. The destructive effects of a severe stroke, or “brain attack,” are regularly everlasting due to the fact that the dead nerve cells can’t be substituted with other ones that work properly.

According to the estimates of Lee Schwamm, an associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s acute stroke program, about 20,000 more stroke sufferers per year could be treated with tPA under the time extension.

But there are experts who expressed concern about the fact that some patients and physicians may act too slowly while treating strokes given the three-hour therapeutic window for tPA. “It is very clear that our focus must remain on the door-to-needle time. Every minute matters during a stroke,” said Patrick Lyden, head of the University of California, San Diego stroke center.

One cannot know yet which category of patients will benefit most from the clot-busting stroke drug because, as stroke
neurologist Dr. Walter Koroshetz of the National Institutes of Health, Koroshetz said, the study focused on mild stroke cases and not on severe ones.