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PODCAST: A New Era In Stroke Care – An Interview With Medtronic's Brett Wall

Positive data from five clinical trials and new treatment guidelines for mechanical thrombectomy devices have ushered in a new era in stroke care. In this first in a new series of podcasts, Medtech Insight spoke at the recent SNIS meeting with Brett Wall, vice president and president of the Neurovascular group at Medtronic, to find out what impact the trials and guidelines are having on stroke care, the market for mechanical thrombectomy devices, demand for Solitaire FR and the company's plans for innovation.

Stroke care will never be the same. The important findings from the MR CLEAN, ESCAPE, EXTEND-IA, SWIFT PRIME and REVASCAT trials, all recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, along with new guidelines from the American Heart Association and the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery, have established mechanical thrombectomy as a new mainstay of therapy for acute ischemic stroke (AIS), and ushered in a new era in stroke treatment. For the last 20 years, the gold standard treatment for AIS has been intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (IV tPA), a clot-busting drug that must be given within 4.5 hours after stroke onset in order to be effective. However, IV tPA has generally not been effective in dissolving clots in patients with large anterior strokes, the most deadly and disabling type, and these patients have had few or no treatment options – until now. (See Also see "Stroke Devices: Hope Amid Headwinds" - Medtech Insight, 27 September, 2013..)

Intracranial mechanical thrombectomy is an endovascular procedure in which physicians thread a catheter through the femoral artery to the site of the clot in the brain, where they use a...

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