Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, and Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are the first sites in either state to join a clinical trial investigating a new headband device designed to detect a stroke at home.
Alarmingly, fewer than 10% of patients who have a stroke receive stroke treatment, typically because they arrive at the hospital too late and are no longer eligible for treatments that are highly time-sensitive.
“Time matters in stroke care. Our current stroke treatments have improved to the point that, if provided in time, patients can return home almost unharmed,” said neurosurgeon Demetrius Lopes, MD, Advocate Aurora Research Institute’s principal investigator for the study. “Yet because strokes cause no pain, can be difficult to identify and often happen while sleeping, the longest delays to treatment occur before a patient ever calls 911.”
The clinical trial is evaluating whether the Halo Alert System can be used to detect strokes in stroke survivors and others who are at risk for a stroke. The device is worn around the head and is designed to record the brain’s electrical activity.
Someone in the U.S. has a stroke every 40 seconds. A stroke is caused by a lack of blood flow to the brain, which quickly results in tissue damage. It is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and the fifth-leading cause of death.
“Recent life-saving advances in stroke treatment have generally focused on reducing diagnostic imaging times at the hospital,” said Melissa Kadar, Director of the Research Institute’s Center of Excellence in Neuroscience Research. “But if researchers can develop new technologies that automatically alert patients when they are having a stroke, we can take the burden of self-assessment off of our patients and hopefully provide faster treatment.”
Participants in the study will sleep wearing the Halo Alert System for at least eight hours every night for 90 days and periodically follow-up with the research team.
Researchers plan to enroll approximately 300 participants in the study, “Zeit alert for stroke at home (ZASH),” which is sponsored by Zeit Medical, Inc., manufacturer of the Halo Alert System.
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