Miguel Perez-Pinzon, Ph.D., FAHA, Chair, International Stroke Conference 2019 Program Committee, offers overviews and perspective on late breaking science being presented at ISC 2019 in Honolulu.  He is Professor of Neurology/Neuroscience, Director, Cerebral Vascular Disease Research Center, Director, Peritz Scheinberg Cerebral Vascular Laboratory, Vice-Chair for Neurology Basic Science at the Miller School of Medicine, Department of Neurology at the University of Miami, Miami, FL.

copyright American Heart Association

"There are two trials, the MISTIE-III trials. And let's go over the first one. It's called MISTIE because it's Minimally Invasive Surgery plus Alteplase for Intracerebral Hemorrhage Evacuation. That's MISTIE-III. And it's basically testing the catheter based removal of blood from the brain after ICH or Intracerebral bleeding with mild or another spell in one year. So, this trial is, this first one is important because there is currently no effective surgical treatment for ICH which is basically the most common type of lethal brain bleed. The procedure for MISTIE is to avoid the damage to the traditional craniotomy by using imaging to guide placement of a suct tube into the blood clot through a small hole in the skull to remove large amounts of blood and toxic blood components. So that's the technique. For medium to large blood clots, the MISTIE procedure did not improve functional recovery after one year of stroke and the good recovery was achieved in 45 percent of MISTIE patients and 41 percent medical therapy patients. So basically, in this respect, the trial was neutral."