(ANSA) - ROME - Italy lacks at least 100 stroke centers, which affects over 100 thousand people every year: 300 would be needed throughout the country, but at the moment there are 190 and 80% are concentrated in the regions of the North.
Furthermore, only 37% of patients are treated with state-of-the-art techniques.
The alarm was raised by the experts of the Italian Society of Interventional Cardiology (GISE), gathered on the occasion of the 'Rome Peripheral Interventions' congress which closes today in Rome.
According to experts, "there are still few Stroke Units where to find all the best therapies for stroke. Less than half of stroke victims receive adequate and timely treatment and less than 40% are treated with intracranial thrombectomy, the most at the forefront for the reopening of occluded vessels to be performed up to 16/24 hours from clinical onset ".
Intracranial thrombectomy is a safe technique and able to reduce residual disability after a stroke - it is explained in a note - This system 'frees' blocked vessels through a percutaneous procedure, and is today a valid alternative to thrombolysis with drugs also because has a longer intervention window, up to 16/24 hours from the onset of symptoms in adequately selected patients with a perfusion study, compared to 4.5-9 hours at most for intravenous thrombolysis.
A key time difference for patients.
"The cerebral stroke represents the first cause of disability in the world, the second cause of dementia and the third cause of mortality in Western countries - says Giovanni Esposito, president of GISE -. In Italy, just over 100 thousand cases of stroke are recorded every year. , of which about a third leads to death within a year and about a third to serious or significant disability: today almost one million Italians live with the disabling consequences of a cerebral stroke, more and more irreversible and serious as the time elapsed before an operation that clears the occlusion of a cerebral artery.
This event, which interrupts the flow of blood to a more or less large area of the brain and is the cause of about 80% of stroke cases, can be resolved with thrombolysis, i.e. with specific drugs that 'dissolve' the clot. , or with thrombectomy, a revascularization operation that is performed percutaneously, through the insertion of special catheters via the femoral route ". (ANSA).