Dawning of a new era for acute stroke therapy

We agree with the authors of this article1 and recent articles from Stroke23 that this is an exciting time to be involved with endovascular acute stroke therapy. The recent flood of positive trials and the proliferation of new devices promise continued progress in the battle against stroke.

We do, however, have concerns about the close relationship of industry with the funding, facilitation, publication, and promotion of the major studies showing the benefit of these expensive and labor intensive procedures. Of the five papers, all recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM),4 all were fully or partially financed by industry (Covidien). Only one study reached its patient recruitment target3 and the others were all stopped early by their safety boards, several with much smaller patient enrollments. The largest and first published trial5 showed that...

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