Sensitivity of prehospital stroke scales for different intracranial large vessel occlusion locations.

Introduction: Prehospital stroke scales have been proposed to identify stroke patients with a large vessel occlusion to allow direct transport to an intervention centre capable of endovascular treatment (EVT). It is unclear whether these scales are able to detect not only proximal, but also more distal treatable occlusions. Our aim was to assess the sensitivity of prehospital stroke scales for different EVT-eligible occlusion locations in the anterior circulation.
Patients and Methods: The MR CLEAN Registry is a prospective, observational study in all centres that perform EVT in the Netherlands. We included adult patients with an anterior circulation stroke treated between March 2014 and November 2017. We used National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale scores at admission to reconstruct previously published prehospital stroke scales. We compared the sensitivity of each scale for different occlusion locations. Occlusions were assessed with CT angiography by an imaging core laboratory blinded to clinical findings.
Results: We included 3021 patients for the analysis of 14 scales. All scales had the highest sensitivity to detect internal carotid artery terminus occlusions (ranging from 0.21 to 0.97) and lowest for occlusions of the M2 segment (0.08 to 0.84, p-values < 0.001). Discussion and conclusion: Although prehospital stroke scales are generally sensitive for proximal large vessel occlusions, they are less sensitive to detect more distal occlusions.
Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interests: The author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: DD reports funding from the Dutch Heart Foundation, Brain Foundation Netherlands, The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development, Health Holland Top Sector Life Sciences & Health, and unrestricted grants from Penumbra Inc., Stryker, Stryker European Operations BV, Medtronic, Thrombolytic Science, LLC and Cerenovus for research, all paid to institution. AvdL reports funding from Stryker. BvdW has received fees for consultation from Bayer, Boehringer Ingelheim, and LivaNova.
(© European Stroke Organisation 2021.)