Associate Professor Steve Ralph talks about the results from the world-first Perispinal Etanercept Clinical Trial for Stroke patients conducted at Griffith University School of Medical Science (Australia). This research was published in January 2020 and funded by the Stroke Recovery Trail Fund LTD (SRTF) and available at this link: For more information email SRTF: strokertf@gmail.com
So i’m joined today by associate professor steve ralph from griffith university school of medical science to talk to us today about the griffith university clinical trial using paraspinal antenna set for stroke patients hi carly thanks for the intro and i also should acknowledge the help and support of the stroke recovery trial fund for backing the trial that we
Successfully completed last year it was a great study very good outcome we had 22 patients who completed on a randomized controlled trial so that means we have two groups of people one to receive a control treatment and the others that received the various finally tennessee and the that’s the drug arm of the study that had 12 patients in it so these are chronic
Stroke patients who suffer from severe constant daily pain and none of the analgesic the the pain killers really work to help them get rid of their pain so they have to deal with it on a daily basis these were patients who also had restricted mobility from their stroke since their stroke episode these are chronic stroke patients so we’re talking years down the
Track average of four to five years post stroke the type of stroke they had typically was an ischemic stroke where basically they’ve had a clot or loss of blood flow going through the cerebral artery and as a result of that they have basically severe disability with this constant pain that they have to manage and really there is not much to help them in that in
That regard so we gave each of the groups two treatments whether they were on the control two treatments of the control treatment which was a saline injection or whether they actually got the real drug the e10 acept and that was all randomized and double-blind so nobody knew who was getting which treatment until the end of the trial when we unraveled the results
To see what the findings were and the findings were pretty staggering and we can tell pretty much during the course of the trial those patients that were showing significant effects because we saw such powerful responses and very rapidly even after the first treatment you would see patients would lose their pain levels from severe pain down to zero within half an
Hour of treatment so again we didn’t see any of that in the control group but we definitely saw these marked effects in the treated arm of the study so these significant results not only applied to pain but also to improvements in mobility in the measure we saw we were using for mobility was to look at their rotation of movement around the shoulder on the affected
Arm being able to lift their arm up versus the normal arm and we found that those patients that were receiving the corresponding contendership showed a dose-dependent response so that means that after the first dose there was a partial improvement which increased after the second dose we’ve got further improvement so that means quite strongly supportive evidence
For the fact that the drug was definitely having an effect an impact and some of the patient’s several the patients actually got back full mobility from having restricted motion to complete 180 degree ability to raise their hand above the head so that was pretty staggering and that was very satisfying and surprising as a result so this improved mobility we hope
Will be maintained a lot of the patients after the trial have still got the improved mobility some have had to have further treatments to to maintain that improve function so they seem to be long lasting but we really do need to do more studies for longer periods of time and perhaps in the future trial will obviously expand the numbers to see if this holds true
For larger numbers of patients and particularly focusing on two key areas of stroke which one is fatigue which is commonly found in stroke patients the other one is on mobility again to see if we can confirm the initial findings some of the patients showed other observations unusual improvements such as sense of smell and balance ability to walk so there were
A lot of lot of improvements that we weren’t focusing on but they was basically side effects of the treatment and and worth noting we allowed our patients on the control group to then obtain if they wanted to proceed with the actual treatment after the trial was completed and many of those actually went on to show benefit from the treatment as well in terms of
Significant improved mobility and function on a daily level so we were very very satisfied with the results of the trial and i think they they bode well for a future study to do a larger analysis of the effects of this treatment on strike not just strike with pain but strike in general looking at fatigue and improvements in mobility for for all patients so again
As i said before i think the stroke trial recovery fund for all their support during the years of undertaking this trial and hopefully we can move on to even bigger and better things in the future i think you stay that’s really exciting exciting news exciting to see it public obviously published and to see that added to the literature and highlights the need for
For further research going ahead so thank you absolutely thank you too
Transcribed from video
Perispinal Etanercept Clinical Trial Results By Stroke Recovery Trial Fund
