Stroke is the 4th leading cause of death in United States with an estimated 1 death every 4
minutes. On average, someone suffers from stroke in United States every 40th second. Stroke
recurs in 1 out of 4 stroke patients. About 87% of the strokes are as a result of ischemic
insult. The total economic burden from stroke accounts to 38.6 billion dollars per year.
Stroke is also one of the leading causes of long term disability. Current stroke therapies
concentrate mainly on acute revascularization, sub-acute rehabilitation and secondary
prevention.
Neuroprotection is not the mainstay of treatment modality as there are no effective regimen
which has satisfied stroke clinicians and researchers. Many neuroprotection agents have shown
excellent pre-clinical results but have failed in clinical translation. Thus we need to find
new treatments in order to decrease the mortality and morbidity caused by stroke.
The investigators hypothesize that adopting a narrower therapeutic window, with treatment
initiation in the first six hours, may demonstrate a positive or significant short and long
term neuroprotective effect from NMDA/Glutaminergic or histaminergic antagonism when compared
with standard of care.