May is Stroke Awareness Month and a new medical breakthrough could help save more lives.
Trials prove that stroke patients can undergo mechanical thrombectomy, where doctors use a device to pull out the clot causing the stroke, within 24 hours of the onset of stroke symptoms.
"The big thing is that this trial extended the window to 24 hours, which is tremendous," said Dr. Parita Bhuva, who specializes in Neurology at Texas Stroke Institute at Medical City Plano.
Dr. Bhuva was one of the principal investigators in the trial.
Since 2015, she's been able to perform mechanical thrombectomy on patients within the first six hours of a blood clot inducing a stroke.
The study's findings mean she'll be able to perform the procedure on patients who go several hours with a stroke-inducing blood clot, such as people who suffer strokes while sleeping and wake up to the symptoms.
"These are people we are talking about who, for the rest of their life, would have been severely disabled, or not survived, versus people who could go back to work, become an active part of society and not be a have under someone's 24 hour care, so that's tremendous," said Dr. Bhuva.
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"Every minute, 1.9 million brain cells die so the sooner we can get that clot out, the better our patients are going to do," Dr. Bhuva.
