London – According to a research study, Andrei Alexandrov, who led the team, high frequency sound waves help to get rid of the deadly blood clots in the brain. They can increase the efficiency of Genentech Inc’s clot dissolver t-PA by 63% by bathing the area in front of the cloth with ultrasound while the drug goes to work.

According to Andrei Alexandrov, who led the study, the technique reduces the brain bleeding:

"We break up clots faster, more efficiently and with less bleeding."
Although t-PA is very effective at dissolving clots, it does not work well if blood is not flowing.

According to Mr. Alexandrov, Ultrasound helps by creating turbulence in blood trapped in front of the clot - similar to the way a person might use a spoon to add sugar to a cup of tea.

"If you don't stir, the sugar's going to sit there for a long time. But if you stir, the sugar dissolves very quickly," Mr Alexandrov, of the University of Texas-Houston, told Reuters.

"In the same way, t-PA cannot get where it's supposed to be because the fluid in front of the blockage is stagnant. So your ultrasound is like a harmless spoon, and you can stir from a distance."

He further said, “If proven effective in further tests, the technique could be used by most hospitals, which already have ultrasound machines comparable to the ones used in this study. However, ultrasound technicians would need a lot more training to locate clots so that ultrasound probes can be positioned properly during treatment.”

According to Reuters, the Alexandrov team studied clots in the middle cerebral artery, located on each side of the head about an inch forward and up from the temple, and about 5 centimetres below the skin.

Clots at that site are responsible for at least 80 per cent of strokes, and 80 per cent of the blood flowing to a hemisphere of the brain flows through that artery.

After two hours, blocked arteries cleared in nearly a third of the 63 patients who got t-PA alone, and nearly half of the other 63, who also got ultrasound, the researchers reported.

After three months, 42 per cent of the ultrasound recipients and 29 per cent who got conventional care were doing well, but the number of patients checked at the three-month mark was too small to be statistically significant, which is why further tests are needed, they cautioned.

In a commentary in The New England Journal of Medicine, where the study appears, Joseph Polak of Tufts School of Medicine in Boston said the Alexandrov team has introduced "a new and exciting use of diagnostic ultrasonography".