Antibiotic Appears Safe For Stroke Patients And Good Companion For TPA
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
By: Medical News Today

Medical News Today

An antibiotic appears to be a safe treatment for stroke and a good companion therapy for tPA, the clot buster that is currently the only FDA-approved drug therapy, researchers report.

A safety study in 60 stroke patients in Georgia, Kentucky and Oregon found the drug well tolerated even at three-and-one-half times the dose currently used for conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, according to a research team led by the Medical College of Georgia and the University of Georgia.

"It's cheap, safe, well tolerated, easy to administer and can be given with tPA," said Dr. David Hess, chairman of the Department of Neurology in the MCG School of Medicine and corresponding author on the study in Stroke.

"This is an old drug that has been studied extensively in healthy young people," said Dr. Susan C. Fagan, professor of pharmacy at UGA, assistant dean for the MCG program of the UGA College of Pharmacy and the study's first author. "Now that we know it's also safe in a predominantly older stroke population, we can look more closely to identify the dose necessary to give us the pharmacologic effect we need."

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