Beijing Tiantan Hospital

So the question is: Should balloon angioplasty be tried early on as the first option in patients with a qualifying ischemic stroke in the territory of symptomatic ICAS, or should we wait for failure of maximal medical management and then offer this more aggressive treatment with submaximal angioplasty? This brings us to a research letter published in this issue of the journal with a posthoc analysis of the BASIS trial by co-first authors Dr.

Fangwan Chen and Dr. Ming Yang from the Department of Interventional Neuroradiology at Beijing Tiantan Hospital, who did this paper on behalf of the BASIS trial collaborators.

It turns out that amongst five hundred and one patients included in this posthoc analysis, thirty-five percent already had a prior history of, uh, ischemic stroke in the territory of the qualifying ICAS artery.

The remaining patients were either enrolled after a primary ischemic stroke or a primary TIA relevant to that ICAS.