One million cells a minute die during stroke

HCA Florida Orange Park Hospital Neurosurgeon Michael Horowitz said time is critical when responding to a stroke.

“One of the most important factors in having successful outcomes treating stroke is to treat people quickly, ”Dr. Horowitz said in a video produced by the hospital, “because with every minute that somebody has ischemia to their brain, about a million or more brain cells die.”

He added that the first step in treating stroke is to give the patient a tissue plasminogen activator.

“These are basically clot-busting drugs that can be given through an IV that can travel up to the clot through the bloodstream and start dissolving the clot in the blood vessels, so the blood vessel reopens,” he said.  

Dr. Horowitz said another treatment is using catheters to remove the clot physically.

“We’re able to get them very quickly from the door of the ER to the angiogram suite, where we’re able to go into their blood vessels with catheters and actually manually steer the catheters to the clot and extract the clot to reopen the blood vessel,” he said.

Dr. Horowitz added that the time it takes to revascularize the blood vessel is also related to the outcome.

“The quicker you can do it, in general,” he said, “the better your patient will do.”