email article
Two small trials added to the evidence that some stroke patients could fare well going straight to mechanical thrombectomy without IV thrombolysis, though the studies were confined to Asian populations and non-inferiority was not shown in the strictest sense.
For patients with acute ischemic stroke due to large vessel occlusion, results were inconclusive (but somewhat favorable) for a strategy of skipping the IV tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) usually recommended prior to mechanical thrombectomy in the Japanese SKIP trial.
However, a similar strategy did prove to be non-inferior to combined thrombectomy and IV tPA in the Chinese DEVT trial.