This news appears to provide vital insights regarding clot-busting therapy. A study claims that women who are not given a clot-busting drug following a stroke seems to perform worse as compared to men who are not treated.
The experts investigated details from stroke database on around 2,113 people who had suffered a stroke. Out of those, roughly 232 were treated with the clot-busting drug called tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) and around 44 percent were women. Of those, men and women were disjointedly put in groups based on whether they were given tPA in three hours subsequent to their stroke.
Study author Michael D. Hill, MD, MSc, FRCPC, with the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, commented, “Women need to be treated for stroke as soon as possible. We found that women who weren’t treated had a worse quality of life after stroke than men. However, the good news is that women who were treated responded just as well as men to the treatment.”
The study seems to have discovered that women who were not given the clot-busting drug appeared to have 12 percent less chances as compared to men to have a good result after around six months or 58 percent of the women as opposed to 70 percent of men. Nevertheless, women who were treated with these medications seem to perform about the same as men who consumed the clot-buster drug.
Hill remarked that there could be many reasons why women who weren’t treated with the clot-busting drug fared worse than men, including biological reasons. One social reason may be that more than 30 percent of women were widowed compared to seven percent of men at the time of stroke, and therefore did not have a spouse who could act as a caregiver. Also, post-stroke depression is more common in women than in men, which slows down recovery.
The study was published in the American Academy of Neurology.