Arthritis Drug Hope For Stroke Patients

A drug used for rheumatoid arthritis has been shown to limit the amount of brain damage in stroke patients in a new study from the University of Manchester.

Dame Nancy Rothwell and Prof Stuart Allan have spent two decades investigating how to reduce damage to the brain after a stroke. They testing the effectiveness of rheumatoid arthritis drug Anakinra on rats in which stroke had been induced and found that those given the drug up to three hours after the stroke had about half the brain damage of the placebo group.
“This is the first time that we are aware of a potential new treatment for stroke being tested in animals with the same sort of diseases and risk factors that most patients have,” says Dame Rothwell.

Clinical trials will begin shortly.
“This drug has real potential to save lives and stop hundreds of thousands of people being seriously disabled by stroke,” enthuses Prof Allan. “This really could be the treatment for stroke that we`ve been looking for over the past two decades.”