Stroke Treatment
A Leader in Advanced Stroke Care
Treatment time is critical for stroke patients. When minutes count, having an advanced stroke center with the technology and capability to care for you can make all of the difference. At Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, we’ve assembled an experienced team of medical specialties to better attend to the critical needs of stroke patients in our community and help improve their outcomes.
Our local interventional neurology team is on-call around the clock to provide an endovascular approach to treating strokes in San Luis Obispo County, drastically improving treatment time and helping to minimize brain damage. When you arrive at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center at the first sign of stroke, our specialized stroke response team has the enhanced ability to provide you with an advanced level of stroke care.
Mechanical Thrombectomy
When it comes to stroke, “Time is Brain.” That’s because there is a small window of time for treatment to be effective. Most strokes are caused by blood clots plugging a blood vessel or artery in the brain (ischemic stroke). Previously, only the use of medical interventions, such as intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), was available in San Luis Obispo County to treat ischemic stroke patients. tPA works by dissolving the clot and improving blood flow to the part of the brain being deprived of blood flow. With the addition of mechanical thrombectomy, physicians at Sierra Vista are now able to directly remove these clots more quickly and effectively than tPA alone.
With mechanical thrombectomy, trained physicians are able to thread a catheter through an artery in the groin up to the blocked artery in the brain and remove a large blood clot with a stent retriever. Both tPA and mechanical thrombectomy need to occur within a few hours in order to be effective and improve chances for stroke survival and recovery. The use of mechanical thrombectomy at Sierra Vista essentially eliminates the need for emergency air transport