Too old to thrombolyse?
- Correspondence to: P C A J Vroomen Department of Neurology, University Medical Center Groningen, Hanzeplein 1, PO Box 30001, 9700 RB Groningen, The Netherlands; c.a.j.vroomen{at}neuro.azg.nl
- Published Online First 30 March 2006
Future trials do include very old patients will hold the answer but in the meantime observational data provide some clues
With the ageing of Western society, the absolute number of strokes occurring is likely to increase and the proportion of very old patients is sure to become greater.1 This poses a double challenge: it will not only test the capacity of Western healthcare but also leave an increasing part of stroke management outside the comfortable confines of evidence-based medicine because younger patients tend to be included in stroke trials. Generalising the results of these trials to elderly people may cause problems for several reasons. The cardiac literature suggests that the …
