Stroke treatment safe at community hospitals
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The clot-busting drugs used to treat stroke can be given just as safely at small community hospitals as they can at large academic medical centers, researchers report in the American Heart Association’s journal Stroke.
Most trials evaluating the risks and benefits of clot-busting therapy, or thrombolysis, have been conducted at major centers, so it was unclear how safe and effective this treatment was at community hospitals, say the investigators.
“So,” co-author Christian Schumacher of Columbia University, New York told Reuters Health, “we wanted to take a look at what’s going on.”
To do so, Schumacher and colleagues assessed the outcomes of 2594 stroke patients who were treated with clot busters at a community hospital between 1999 and 2002.
The rate of in-hospital death was 11.4 percent and the rate of bleeding within the brain, a complication of these drugs, was 4.4 percent.
These findings are similar to those seen in previous reports and “show that thrombolysis is applied in the community with the same safety” as it is at major medical centers, Schumacher said.
Nevertheless, he concluded that “our results can only be preliminary since we had to use a (hospital) discharge database.” However, a forward-looking stroke registry that will be similar to the National Cancer Registry “is currently in the pilot phase so, in the future, we will have better data to work from.”
SOURCE: Stroke, February 2006.
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