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(Stroke. 2007;38:863.)
© 2007 American Heart Association, Inc.

Letters to the Editor

Previous Antiplatelet Treatment and Mortality in Patients With Intracerebral Hemorrhage

Servei de Neurologia, Hospital del Mar, Barcelona, Spain

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

To the Editor:

Foerch et al¹ reported that pretreatment with antiplatelet agents was not an independent risk factor of mortality and unfavourable outcome in patients with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). They studied 1691 patients with ICH and found that 26% of them were taking antiplatelet agents. Pretreatment with antiplatelet agents was a significant predictor of in-hospital mortality and unfavourable clinical outcome in the univariate logistic regression. However, after adjustment for age and prehospital status evaluated by the modified Rankin Scale, antiplatelet pretreatment was not an independent risk factor of in-hospital death.

Our group recently reported a detailed study demonstrating that previous antiplatelet therapy is an independent predictor of 30-day mortality after spontaneous supratentorial intracerebral hemorrhage.² In order to avoid any possible bias, we excluded patients with previous history of ICH, a prior modified Rankin Scale >2, current anticoagulant treatment, infratentorial ICH, multiple ICH, primary intraventricular hemorrhage, ICH secondary to brain tumors, and patients treated by neurosurgical procedures. The impact of pretreatment with antiplatelet agents on mortality was controlled by age, as well as for other major determinants of ICH outcome such as Glasgow Scale Score (GSS), serum glucose level, volume of the ICH, and ventricular extension of the ICH. The percentage of ICH patients pretreated with antiplatelet agents in our study was 24.2%, a value similar to that found by Foerch et al (26%). In our study, the univariate analysis showed that previous antiplatelet treatment (OR: 2.77; 95% CI: 1.38 to 5.59; P=0.004), age, GSS at admission, ICH volume, ventricular . . . [Full Text of this Article]