TIA – Treatment

Transcript

So the treatment for TIA really hinges on the notion, the fundamental notion that a TIA is a stroke that can be prevented. So the treatment is identifying or looking really, really carefully for any stroke risk factor, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, smoking, obesity, physical inactivity and addressing it aggressively. And then also looking for other clearcut things that would change your management like again, carotid stenosis that needs to be treated. And again, we can see that on any of the imaging modalities we talked about. Atrial fibrillation or irregular heart rhythms or severe cardiac disease that we address those issues based on what we find, and any other problems within the brain itself. Again, the important thing here is recognizing the stroke that could happen and trying to prevent it. The strategies that generally you’re going to see every doctor do, they’re going to give you some type of blood thinner. Aspirin is the most common one, but there are other ones such as a drug called aggrenox or another drug called Plavix or clopidogrel. And they’ll also want to aggressively treat things like cholesterol frequently with statins, on top of blood pressure control. Those are the things you’ll see most universally. Again, sort of going back to the beginning here, the fundamental issue here is the stroke that could happen and looking for the stroke risk factor that we can help affect to reduce your future risk of stroke.