New research suggests every 15 minutes of delay in delivering a clot-busting drug to stroke victims shortens their disability-free life expectancy by about a month.
On a lighter note, delivering the drug only one minute could add 1.8 days onto the patient's expected healthy life, an American Heart Association news release reported.
"'Save a minute; save a day' is the message from our study, which examined how even small reductions in treatment delays might benefit patients measurably in the long run," said Atte Meretoja, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., lead author of the study and associate professor of neurology at the University of Melbourne in Australia said in the news release.
The clot-busting drug, dubbed tPA, is recommended to be administered within 4.5 hours of the first sign of symptoms. The sooner it is given, the better the results.
"Clot-busting treatment works equally well, irrespective of race, ethnicity or gender," Meretoja said. "Speedy restoration of blood flow to the brain is crucial for brain cell survival everywhere."
Even the fastest stroke services (in Helsinki, Finland and Australia) take about 20 minutes from arrival at the hospital to administer the drug; in places like the U.S. it can take up to 80 minutes.
"In this study, we wanted to quantify the importance of speed in the hope that concrete easy-to-relate-to figures will inspire medical services to measure and improve their game for the benefit of our stroke patients," Meretoja said.
To make their findings the researchers looked at 2,258 consecutive stroke patients from Australia and Finland to determine if their health would be better if they had been treated more quickly.
"In stroke treatment, every minute saved gives patients days of healthy life," Meretoja said. "Patients should never wait a single minute for stroke signs, such as face droop, arm weakness or speech disturbance, to go away. They should call for help immediately. Additionally, most emergency medical services and hospitals have the ability to reduce response and treatment delays significantly, and we have described how to do this."
