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(Stroke. 2005;36:2323.)
© 2005 American Heart Association, Inc.

Controversies in Stroke

Use of Animal Models Has Not Contributed to Development of Acute Stroke Therapies

Pro

Markku Kaste, MD, PhD, FAHA

From the Department of Neurology, Helsinki University Central Hospital, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.

Correspondence to Markku Kaste, MD, PhD, FAHA, Professor and Chairman, Department of Neurology, Helsinki University Central Hospital, University of Helsinki, FI-00029 HUS Helsinki, Finland. E-mail markku.kaste@hus.fi

Section Editors: Geoffrey A. Donnan MD, FRACP Stephen M. Davis MD, FRACP

Key Words: acute stroke • animal models

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

In the beautiful archipelago of Stockholm, there was a satellite symposium in connection with the World Congress of Medicine in 1980. The role of calcium was then a hot topic in the cerebral ischemic cascade.¹ A paper presented at the symposium demonstrated that a calcium blocker was able to decrease the size of brain infarction in rats. Already then I had a few reservations about such experimental models. In a laboratory, an investigator can modify all known confounding factors and the time from onset of ischemia to the administration of an experimental drug. The body temperature, blood pressure, blood glucose, and acid-base balance of animals can be kept constant and within normal physiological ranges. In a busy emergency room, where an elderly stroke patient is admitted with many severe concomitant diseases, ie, fragile diabetes, untreated hypertension, recent myocardial infarction, and imminent heart failure, the treating physician has major problems in balancing them while the time from onset of symptoms is, at best, an educational guess. I pointed out my doubts and asked whether the treatment would have an equal efficacy in humans as it had in rats. There was no good answer. Twenty-four years later and having been a principal investigator and a steering committee member in many acute stroke trials, I still have my doubts.

Since the early days of neuroprotecting agents in treatment of acute stroke, more than 700 drugs have been studied and more than 4000 papers describing their neuroprotective efficacy have been published,² and yet none . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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