Intravenous thrombolysis for acute cerebral ischaemia in old stroke patients ≥ 80 years of age.

Despite increasing life expectancy, few data exist on the outcome of elderly stroke patients treated with IV thrombolysis. We analyzed the prospectively collected data from the Lille University Hospital stroke unit on patients treated with IV rt-PA within 4.5 h, comparing patients ≥80 years to younger ones. We considered the following outcomes: neurological improvement at the acute phase (NIHSS 0 or 1 at 24 h, or if the difference between NIHSS at 24 h and at baseline was ≥4), occurrence of intracerebral haemorrhage, mortality and functional outcome in survivors (favourable if mRS ≤2 or equal to pre-stroke score) at 3 months. Predictors of vital and functional outcome were determined using logistic regression analysis. Four hundred patients were treated with IV rt-PA, 98 (25%) being ≥80 years. The proportion of patients with neurological improvement at the acute phase (31 vs. 40%, OR 0.7, 95%CI 0.4-1.2), and with ICH (19 vs. 21%, OR 0.9, 95%CI 0.5-1.7) was similar among older and younger patients. At 3 months, 35% of patients ≥80 years had died; 52% of survivors had favourable functional outcome. Using multivariate analysis, age ≥80 years was an independent predictor of death (3.4; 95%CI 1.6-7.3), and of reduced likelihood of favourable functional outcome in survivors (OR 0.3; 95%CI 0.2-0.7) at 3 months. Although outcome at 3 months is worse for older patients than for their younger counterparts, our results are encouraging with a similar proportion of patients with early neurological improvement and with ICH in old and young patients and about half of the survivors having a favourable functional outcome in patients ≥80 years.