The persisting burden of intracerebral haemorrhage: can effective treatments be found?

Abstract

Colin Josephson, Rustam Al-Shahi Salman, and colleagues discuss the effectiveness of treatments for intracerebral haemorrhage.

Figure 1. Selected pathophysiological mechanisms that have been identified in humans after acute, spontaneous intracerebral haemorrhage.

Shapes are approximate illustrations of when pathophysiological mechanisms are at their peak and their known durations. Uncertainties about the duration and intensity of mechanisms are indicated by dashed lines.

Figure 2. Summary of selected radiological studies of spontaneous intracerebral haemorrhage growth.

Studies are organised in ascending order of the duration of the time window of the first computed tomogram. Manual calculations of haematoma volume used the ABC/2 method. We excluded data on patients taking anticoagulant drugs in these studies, and excluded studies from which data could not be extracted ,, studies that incorporated patients already included in the summary above ,, or studies in which interventions may have influenced haematoma growth ,.