Working to save the stricken brain.(researchers are exploring several new treatments for stroke)

Just two weeks after giving birth to a daughter last November, Michelle Larwood suffered a major stroke. One moment, the Los Angeles woman, 38, sat calmly in a doctor's waiting room. The next, she recalls, "I couldn't speak, and I couldn't move my right side." Neurologists at UCLA's Stroke Center soon found the cause: a clot blocked the middle cerebral artery feeding the left side of her brain. Watching the blocked vessel on a monitor, an interventional radiologist snaked a tiny catheter tube through a leg artery and into her brain, penetrating the clot. Once he got it past the blockage, the doctor unfurled a tiny corkscrew and gently pulled, much like a sommelier easing a cork from a bottle of vintage merlot. It worked: a week later she was home with her husband and new daughter, Olivia. "I'm just so grateful," she says.

Since 1996, a clot-busting drug called "tissue plasminogen activator," or tPA, has been the sole treatment for strokes in the United States, and it can work wonders under some conditions. But even today few patients get its benefits. That's because the intravenous drug is clearly effective only when given within three hours of a stroke's onset. Even then, tPA can cause dangerous bleeding, so many patients whose strokes were caused by brain hemorrhage--or who had recent operations like Larwood's caesarean section--aren't eligible at all. As a result, just a tiny portion of stroke victims get the tPA treatment. Stroke kills more than 5 million people worldwide every year, and it's a leading cause of long-term disability. Fortunately, the outlook is starting to change. Researchers are exploring several new treatments that, if successful, could make comebacks like Larwood's commonplace.

Until recently no one dreamed of plucking clots from people's brains, but experts now have high hopes for the technique. "Mechanical clot retrieval is a big step for strokes," says Dr. Walter Koroshetz, director of acute-stroke service at Massachusetts General Hospital. "It gets away from using dangerous drugs." The experimental device that helped Larwood was invented by Dr. Pierre Gobin of New York- Presbyterian Hospital and is already approved in Europe. The so-called MERCI retriever (mechanical embolus removal in cerebral ischemia) consists of a nickel-titanium coil that straightens out in the catheter, then springs back to shape to capture the clot. Proponents see several potential advantages. The device can be used up to eight hours after a ...