TUESDAY, April 7 (HealthDay News) -- In response to the rapid pace of technological development in the field of intracranial endovascular cerebrovascular interventions, the American Heart Association has released guidelines on performance of such procedures to treat a range of cerebrovascular disorders. The indications were laid out in a statement published online April 6 in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Philip M. Meyers, M.D., of Columbia University in New York City, and colleagues in the statement's writing group reviewed literature on intracranial endovascular cerebrovascular interventions, published between 1966 and 2007, to identify outcome benchmark and monitoring data. They presented their findings and recommendations for various types of aneurysms and strokes and different types of procedures.
Among the recommendations were that endovascular occlusion should be considered to treat cerebral aneurysm, while patients with acute ischemic stroke who are ineligible for intravenous thrombolysis can be considered candidates for intra-arterial thrombolysis if their stroke syndrome is of less than six hours' duration, the authors write. Some patients with cerebral arteriovenous malformations may be suitable for endovascular surgery as a palliative or preoperative treatment to prevent stroke or hemorrhage, the researchers note.
"The present document characterizes the expected success and complication rates for intracranial endovascular interventional procedures when performed by highly skilled operators," the authors write. "This information should be useful to enable assessment of the appropriateness, safety and efficacy of neurovascular procedures for individual operators and institutional programs."
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