Word: tpa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most terrifying. Suddenly, your arm goes numb. You can't speak. Half your body becomes useless. Until recently, doctors could do little more than watch as their stroke patients either recovered on their own or became permanently paralyzed. Then researchers determined that a drug called tissue plasminogen activator, or TPA, which has been used for years to treat heart attacks, can also alter the course of a stroke. But many physicians wouldn't try the new treatment because there is also a chance that it can make a stroke patient's condition worse. That reluctance may begin to fade...
...medical breakthrough, a genetically engineered clot-dissolving drug, TPA, has been found to help prevent the irreversible brain damage that afflicts many stroke victims. Patients who received the drug were at least 30% more likely than untreated patients to suffer zero or minimal disability after three months. On the downside: TPA carries a small risk of brain hemorrhage and must be administered within three hours of the stroke...
...drug already used to treat heart attacks also reduces the damage caused by strokes, a European study shows. The medicine, TPA -- tissue plasminogen activator -- enabled stroke victims to live healthier lives, but did not reduce their death rate, according to researchers at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. "For stroke victims this news is important because just a little more ability goes a long way," saysTIME science writer Christine Gorman. "If you have 10 percent more ability in your left hand -- it's amazing how important that is to someone who has had a stroke and survived." Approximately...
...going for it, then Chicago Hope would be a big hit too. But ER is probably the most realistic doctor show TV has ever done. That realism goes beyond the graphic operating-room scenes and rapid-fire medical jargon ("O.K., we gotta go with it -- 5,000 units heparin, tPA 10 milligrams, push. Sixty over one hour. Let's get another EKG. Keep him on the monitor ..."). The show's hopped-up pace and jumbled texture -- stories start, stop and overlap seemingly at random -- set it apart from almost anything else on the air. "There's a rhythmic instinct...
While such therapies remain theoretical, reducing stickiness is already proving useful in heart disease, specifically in combatting a dangerous side effect of clot-busting drugs like streptokinase or TPA. Doctors have found that after such drugs are used, lingering pieces of broken-up clots (consisting mainly of platelets) look to surveillance cells like a flood of damaged tissue. Instantly, the inflammation process kicks in: the affected region of the heart becomes sticky and therefore prone to further clotting. Adhesion research has produced a drug now being tested on heart patients that keeps the scattering clot fragments from sticking...