Endovascular clot retrieval for acute ischaemic stroke: the Auckland City Hospital experience
Peter Alan Barber, Qiliang Liu, Stefan Brew, Ben McGuinness, Ayton Hope, Maurice Moriarty, Doug Campbell, Dominic Tse
Stroke affects 8,000 New Zealanders every year with half dying from the stroke or left being disabled. Current treatments are not very effective. A new therapy is clot retrieval where the clot that blocks an artery that causes a stroke is retrieved (ie, pulled out). This restores blood flow to the brain and reduces the permanent brain damage. This study reports the results from the 1st 33 stroke patients treated with clot retrieval at Auckland City Hospital. The outcomes of the stroke patients in Auckland are similar to those seen in a series of five landmark trials published earlier in 2015 in the New England Journal of Medicine (Auckland City Hospital participated in one of these trials.). The authors recommend that District Health Boards group together into regions where clot retrieval is given at a single large centre.
