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Blood Clot Removal Could Help More Stroke Victims, Study Finds

The window for helping certain stroke patients with a potentially life-saving blood clot removal surgical treatment may be longer than previously thought, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Traditionally stroke is treated with medications that stabilize or diminish blood clots in the brain. In select patients surgical intervention to remove the clot may be possible to mitigate effects of the stroke.

Currently, the American Stroke Association advises that blood clot removal for some patients -- an emergency procedure called endovascular thrombectomy recently developed and increasingly used in addition to medical therapies -- should be done within six hours afterstroke symptoms to lower the amount of disability patients will face later. But this analysis showed that the time for treatment could be slightly longer -- up to 7.3 hours.