TPA: Life-saving Stroke Treatment

“Time is brain.” That’s the adage doctors use when they talk about surviving a stroke with minimal damage to the brain. If the patient is having an ischemic stroke, the kind that is caused by a blood clot, doctors have a four-and-a-half-hour window from the onset of the stroke to administer TPA. So, what is TPA and how does it work?

As a member of the medical staff at MarinHealth, neurologist Ilkan Cokgor is an expert in the treatment of stroke. In this podcast, she explains how stroke patients are evaluated, when TPA is an appropriate treatment, and when interventional neurology can be used to remove a clot.