A second randomized controlled trial in the space of 3 days has shown benefit of endovascular thrombectomy for the treatment of stroke caused by basilar artery occlusion.
The Basilar Artery Occlusion Chinese Endovascular (BAOCHE) trial was presented at the European Stroke Organisation Conference (ESOC) 2022 on May 6.
Just 2 days earlier, a similar trial (ATTENTION) was presented at the same meeting, also showing a benefit of thrombectomy in patients with basilar artery occlusion stroke. These are the first randomized trials to show benefit of thrombectomy in this population.
The two trials, which were both conducted in China, differed slightly in that ATTENTION recruited patients presenting within 12 hours of stroke onset whereas BAOCHE enrolled patients in the 6- to 24-hour time window.
Both trials have shown remarkably similar results, with large increases in the number of patients achieving favorable functional outcomes when treated with thrombectomy.
In the BAOCHE trial, endovascular thrombectomy improved rates of a favorable functional outcome, defined as a modified Rankin Scale(mRS) score of 0 to 3 at 90 days, by 22% from 24.3% in the control groups to 46.4% in the intervention group, with a number needed to treat of just 4.5, reported colead investigator, Tudor Jovin, MD, chair of neurology at Cooper University Hospital, Cherry Hill, New Jersey.
