12 medical societies endorse new guidelines for stroke interventions

The Society of Intervention Radiology (SIR) and 11 other medical societies have endorsed revised guidelines for the nonsurgical, image-guided interventional treatment of acute ischemic stroke. The updated guidelines were published in the Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology.

The group responsible for these revised guidelines used recent research to develop 15 metrics on patient care and outcomes, updating the 2013 guidelines as necessary.

“The one constant in stroke treatment is time to opening the artery,” David Sacks, MD, an interventional radiologist at Reading Hospital/Tower Health in West Reading, Pennsylvania, and the lead author of the revised guidelines, said in a prepared statement from SIR. “Seconds count from time of admission to successful treatment. Meeting the outcomes described in these guidelines will ultimately benefit patients by requiring strict adherence to a rapid treatment schedule.”

“We know from recent studies that rapid access to interventional treatments increases the odds of survival and decreases the occurrence of disability in patients who suffered an acute ischemic stroke,” M. Victoria Marx, MD, president of SIR and a professor at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, said in the same statement. “Now is the time for these guidelines to be adopted and applied to save lives.”