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“We are looking for a safe treatment for stroke patients who cannot receive tPA.”īecause artificial microbubbles are already widely used as contrasting agents, Hoelscher suspected they could be safely used in combination with HIFU to dissolve blood clots. So, regardless of how successful this approach is 97 percent of the population will not benefit from it,” says Thilo Hoelscher, Director of UC San Diego’s Brain Ultrasound Research Laboratory and co-author on the paper. With or without ultrasound, tPA is only available to about 3 percent of all stroke victims worldwide. “These experiments never made too much sense to me.
THE TINY BALLS OF FAT THAT COULD REVOLUTIONIZE MEDICINE HOW TO
In the years after, many researchers built on this result by trying to figure out how to administer ultrasound to maximize the clot-busting effectiveness of tPA.
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A clinical trial in 2004 confirmed that obstructed blood vessels cleared more quickly when ultrasound was administered in combination with tPA. In the early 1990s, researchers noticed that ultrasound scans seemed to enhance the effectiveness of drugs like tPA, but nobody knew why.
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For safety reasons, it can only be administered to some patients and then only within four-and-a-half hours of the initial stroke. But it is estimated that less than five percent of all patients transported to emergency rooms actually receive the clot-dissolving drug.
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“Without some kind of preliminary data, it’s a non-starter there’s just no way for us to find funding,” Szeri adds.īubbles and Ultrasound, Safe Stroke Treatment?Īside from surgery, a drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is currently the only federally approved treatment for stroke-causing blood clots. But before this can happen, we need to establish some fundamental background work, which includes understanding how HIFU accelerates damage to a clot when bubbles are present,” says Andrew Szeri, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley and co-author of the paper.Īccording to Szeri, the team’s NERSC allocation was incredibly valuable because it allowed them to generate the preliminary data needed to write a research proposal for funding in a new area. “One day, HIFU could be a useful medical treatment for people who are stroke victims. Their findings were published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The team used supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to figure out how this might work. Now, researchers from the Universities of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and San Diego (UCSD) suspect these clots could be broken up-without surgery or drugs-using a combination of microbubbles and high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU).
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The longer the clot stays intact, the more brain tissue dies, the higher the chance of severe damage, and the lower a victim’s chance of survival. More than 795,000 Americans suffer a stroke every year, which happens when a clot blocks an artery or blood vessel and restricts blood flow to the brain. Strokes are the most common cause of long-term disability in the United States and the third most common cause of death. For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g.Researchers are using computer simulations to investigate how ultrasound and tiny bubbles injected into the bloodstream might break up blood clots, limiting the damage caused by a stroke in its first hours. TED’s videos may be used for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons License, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives (or the CC BY – NC – ND 4.0 International) and in accordance with our TED Talks Usage Policy (). You’re welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.
THE TINY BALLS OF FAT THAT COULD REVOLUTIONIZE MEDICINE PLUS
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