Jipmer has significantly reduced the time to thrombolysis, or clot-dissolving, blood flow restoring treatment, after reaching hospital to under an hour, according to Sunil Narayan, Dean (Research) and Head of Neurology and stroke care services in Jipmer.
Addressing a recent CME held to educate doctors from medical colleges, especially the postgraduate doctors in the region, Dr. Narayan said while the time to thrombolysis had been consistently reduced to less than one hour in the last three years, this duration ideally needed to be brought down to half an hour.
The neurology chief also retraced the gradual upgradation of stroke care services in Jipmer which now included thrombolytic therapy, surgical decompression for large strokes from 2009, mechanical thrombectomy from 2024 and various neurorehabilitation therapies, including robotics. A stroke post-doctoral fellowship training programme has also been introduced at Jipmer, he said.
During the event, P. Vijaya, president of the Indian Stroke Association formally released the Jipmer stroke guidelines edited by Dr. Narayan and the Jipmer stroke team.
In her address, Dr. Vijaya, who had established a stroke treatment facility in Guntur in Andhra Pradesh as early as in 1990s and had spearheaded a globally acclaimed public campaign against stroke, stressed the gravity of the growing epidemic of stroke in India and other low-income countries where its devastating effects were the worst.
The programme was chaired by Vir Singh Negi, Jipmer Director. S.Vinodkumar, Medical Superintendent and Pankaj Kundra, acting Dean, felicitated.
Experts, while highlighting this year’s World Stroke Day theme of “Act Fast: Every minute counts”, stressed the need to raise awareness among the public and the healthcare workers about the highly lethal medical condition, for which effective treatment was available and hence a preventable disease, if addressed early in an appropriate manner.
The disease occurs due to blockage or rupture of blood vessels that take blood to brain or eyes and presents as sudden weakness or numbness of one side of body, loss of balance, headache or loss of vision and is sometimes fatal. With immediate, timely treatment in 3 to 4 hours, the blocked blood vessels can be opened with a medicine administered through veins. If the patient comes within 6 to 9 hours, a device is inserted at the groin all the way into the blood vessels supplying the brain. Among both costly interventions, the former was available in all district hospitals and medical colleges while the latter was available only in advanced centres like Jipmer, it was pointed out.
According to the Jipmer Medical Superintendent, these services were being provided free to the patients through various insurance schemes 24X7. A pre-hospital acute stroke care programme is operational in collaboration with the Indira Gandhi Government General Hospital.
Dr. Kundra said it was planned to further augment the stroke services by developing a dedicated Neuroscience centre with 24-hour MR imaging facility, which will especially help patients arriving past the short treatment windows.
Ramkumar Sugumar, Rajeswari Aghoram, Saranya Gomathy, (neurology), Nagarajan and Shantakumar (Radiodiagnosis) and Padma Priya (Physical Medicine) spoke at the CME which was attended by over 50 doctors.
A patient awareness programme was also held for patients, caretakers and school and nursing students that outlined preventive measures, such as attaining control of high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol levels and by stopping smoking, alcohol, drug abuse and taking to healthy eating, exercise and sleep habits.
Published – November 25, 2025 09:14 pm IST
