Intracerebral hemorrhage

Abstract

Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) represents a significant fraction of all strokes and causes a disproportionate amount of stroke related morbidity and mortality, especially in young blacks. While diagnosis of this disorder has greatly improved in the CT era, morbidity and mortality remain essentially unchanged. Not one currently utilized therapeutic modality has been clearly associated with a beneficial effect on long term outcome in small prospective randomized treatment trials for ICH. In spite of the lack of scientific data regarding therapy, patients often require aggressive medical and surgical intervention because of the life-threatening presentation of many patients. Recent clinical and experimental ICH research has identified a number of potentially effective new therapeutic strategies, and time to treatment is likely to be very important as it is for ischemic stroke. Large prospective, randomized, placebo controlled trials to examine the judicious application of current therapeutic modalities, and to investigate the potential benefit of proposed new treatment modalities, are long overdue.