Strategy for the treatment of acute thromboembolic stroke involving an internal carotid artery.

SUMMARY: With the recent improvement of endovascular techniques, intra-arterial local fibrinolytic therapy has become widely available for treatment of acute embolic stroke and there is some evidence that it could be superior to conventional approaches (1-6). However, because of high mortality and morbidity, strokes involving the internal carotid artery (ICA) and featuring acute thromboembolic occlusion remain problematic (7). We have successfully performed intra-arterial local fibrinolytic therapy via the anterior communicating artery through the contra-lateral ICA in two consecutive cases of thromboembolic occlusion of the ICA, anterior cerebral artery (ACA) and middle cerebral artery (MCA), and obtained satisfactory results.We here present details of this new technique applied for the two cases and discuss the efficacy of this method compared with conventional approaches.