Pharmacological Strategies for Stroke Intervention: Assessment of Pathophysiological Relevance and Clinical Trials

The present review describes stroke pathophysiology in brief and discusses the spectrum of available treatments with different promising interventions that are in clinical settings or are in clinical trials.

Relevant articles were searched using Google Scholar, Cochrane Library, and PubMed. Keywords for the search included ischemic stroke, mechanisms, stroke interventions, clinical trials, and stem cell therapy.

Stroke accounts to a high burden of mortality and morbidity around the globe. Time is an important factor in treating stroke. Treatment options are limited; however, agents with considerable efficacy and tolerability are being continuously explored. With the advances in stroke interventions, new therapies are being formulated with a hope that these may aid the ongoing protective and reparative processes. Such therapies may have an extended therapeutic time window in hours, days, weeks, or longer and may have the advantage to be accessible by a majority of the patients.