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(Stroke. 2007;38:e81.)
© 2007 American Heart Association, Inc.

Letters to the Editor

Response to Letter by Gupta et al

David Fiorella, MD, PhD; Elad I. Levy, MD; Aquilla Turk, MD; Henry H. Woo, MD; Felipe C. Albuquerque, MD Cameron G. McDougall, MD

Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

Response:

We thank Dr Gupta and colleagues for their interest in our article. The authors discuss several issues with the content of our recent article.

The first issue was regarding "patient selection." Our study is a prospective, multicenter, all-inclusive, registry of patients with symptomatic intracranial atherostenoses (>50%) who have undergone treatment with the Wingspan system. Our primary goal was to rapidly gather a large, reliable data set that could be analyzed critically to facilitate a better global understanding of intracranial angioplasty and stenting and to provide an assessment of the role of the Wingspan in the treatment of this disease process. To this end, it was our intention to be as inclusive as possible with respect to the patients enrolled. The inclusion criteria for the current study were not meant to stand as guidelines or recommendations with respect to future patient selection for treatment. This represents a postmarket "real world" registry that provides an accurate assessment of the results, which can be expected with this device when applied by a large and diverse group of operators at selected high volume institutions. Specifically, Dr Gupta et al object to the inclusion of patients who "were not on antiplatelet therapy" at the time of their qualifying event because they feel that the natural history of such patients is "...not clear to date" and, therefore, the selection of such patients for angioplasty and stenting "...may be a bit aggressive." With respect to this concern, we would refer the authors to the WASID study, . . . [Full Text of this Article]