Chapters Transcript Video Rapid Stroke Intervention My name is Guillerme Dabus. I'm an interventional neuroradiologist. I am the co-director of interventional neuroradiology and the director for clinical neuroscience for Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute. So thrombectomies are procedures that are done to treat patients when they have acute stroke and their and a main vessel in their brain is blocked, which we call like a large vessel occlusion. There's some studies going on to determine if even smaller vessels could be treated that way if it would be beneficial for the patients. But there's a procedure that every time you come in and you do have stroke symptoms that are severe enough and you have important blockage in the blood vessel in your brain, you need to have that treated. This is usually done in comprehensive stroke centers such as Baptist Hospital, where basically we have all the capabilities to, to address, uh, that type of problem, which is a very serious problem. It's a catheter-based procedure. So we go for a little catheter, little plastic tube to the patient's groin or to the patient's wrist most of the time, and then we navigate this inside the patient's body. We get to where the blockage is, which is very deep into the brain most of the time, and then basically what we do is we try to remove the clot using some different types of devices that we have. It could be an aspiration catheter. Basically we just go there as a vacuum cleaner and we just. Aspirate, uh, the clot. Sometimes we need to use little stents that pull the clot out. So the important thing is really not what kind of technique or what kind of device you use. The important thing is that you go there as fast as possible and you go there and get the vessel open to reestablish the blood flow to, to the patient's brain. I think it's very important to understand that stroke, there are some measures that we can do to try to prevent them, but even doing everything we can, some patients will still suffer a stroke. So what is very important is people are aware and can recognize signs of stroke. Remember, be fast, B for balance, E for eyes, so any problem with balance, any vision problem. Problems fast mean face, so any like facial drooping, for example, A for arms, you can ask the person to raise his arms. If he cannot raise one of the arms or if he's weak on one side, again, it's a very important sign. As for speech if you're having trouble or if someone is having trouble to speak or to understand. And T for time, meaning like if you have any of those symptoms, could be a sign of stroke. So your patient needs to be evaluated immediately. So T for time, which is very important. So don't waste time. Time is brain. So the faster you can get to the emergency department to be evaluated, the greater your chance of having a good outcome. Every time you have symptoms of an acute stroke, you need to be brought in as soon as possible, right? We have an extended time window which we call, what's up to 24 hours to do screening of those patients and see if they would be candidates. However, those patients, as soon as they have the symptoms, they need to be brought in to the emergency department for evaluation because the sooner these patients get to us, the sooner they're treated, the greater the chance of them having a good outcome. This is probably one of the most time sensitive things in medicine nowadays. Right, so when you have a patient that presents with acute stroke symptoms, if he's a candidate for thrombectomy, which was the procedure that we did, this should be done immediately. You cannot wait. This takes priority over any other procedure that we do at Baptist Health Miami Neuroscience Institute, we have a great collaboration between our stroke neurologists, our interventional neuroradiologists, our neuro ICU intensivists, as well as with our rehabilitation doctors. We are able to provide. The state of the art treatment for these patients that gives them the best chance of a great recovery. To learn more, visit baptisthealth.net/neuroscience. Created by
