Understanding the Remarkable Decline in Stroke Mortality in Recent Decades

Evaluating Rehabkompassen® - A Digital Graphic Follow-up Tool for Identifying Rehabilitation Needs Among People With Stroke: A Randomized Clinical Feasibility Study (Preprint)

Background

Stroke is a leading cause of disability among adults, with heavy social and economic burden worldwide. A cost-effective solution is urgently needed to facilitate the identification of individual rehabilitation needs and thereby provide tailored rehabilitations to reduce disability among people who have had a stroke. A novel digital graphic follow-up tool Rehabkompassen has recently been developed to facilitate capturing the multidimensional rehabilitation needs of people who have had a stroke.

Objective

The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of conducting a definitive trial to evaluate Rehabkompassen as a digital follow-up tool among people who have had a stroke in outpatient clinical settings.

Methods

This pilot study of Rehabkompassen was a parallel, open-label, 2-arm prospective, proof-of-concept randomized controlled trial (RCT) with an allocation ratio of 1:1 in a single outpatient clinic. Patients who have had a stroke within the 3 previous months, aged ≥18 years, and living in the community were included. The trial compared usual outpatient visits with Rehabkompassen (intervention group) and without Rehabkompassen (control group) at the 3-month follow-up as well as usual outpatient visit with Rehabkompassen at the 12-month follow-up. Information on the recruitment rate, delivery, and uptake of Rehabkompassen; assessment and outcome measures completion rates; the frequency of withdrawals; the loss of follow-up; and satisfaction scores were obtained. The key outcomes were evaluated in both groups.

Results

In total, 28 patients (14 control, 14 Rehabkompassen) participated in this study, with 100 patients screened. The overall recruitment rate was 28% (28/100). Retention in the trial was 86% (24/28) at the 12-month follow-up. All participants used the tool as planned during their follow-ups, which provided a 100% (24/24) task completion rate of using Rehabkompassen and suggested excellent feasibility. Both patient- and physician-participants reported satisfaction with the instrument (19/24, 79% and 2/2, 100%, respectively). In all, 2 (N=2, 100%) physicians and 18 (N=24, 75%) patients were willing to use the tool in the future. Furthermore, modified Rankin Scale as the primary outcome and various stroke impacts as secondary outcomes were both successfully collected and compared in this study.

Conclusions

This study demonstrated the high feasibility and adherence of the study protocol as well as the high acceptability of Rehabkompassen among patients who have had a stroke and physicians in an outpatient setting in comparison to the predefined criterion. The information collected in this feasibility study combined with the amendments of the study protocol may improve the future definitive RCT. The results of this trial support the feasibility and acceptability of conducting a large definitive RCT.

Trial Registration

ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04915027; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04915027

Assessments of a novel digital follow-up tool Rehabkompassen® to identify rehabilitation needs among stroke patients in an outpatient setting

Introduction

It remains a huge challenge to identify individual rehabilitation needs in a time-efficient manner for providing patient-tailored rehabilitation during the continuum of stroke care. We have recently demonstrated the usefulness of a paper-version Rehab-Compass as a follow-up tool. The aim of the current study was to develop a digital version of the Rehab-Compass and evaluate its usability and feasibility.

Methods

The novel digital tool Rehabkompassen® was developed by an iterative and participatory design process. Patients' rehabilitation needs were visualized by the tool and used before, during, and after the consultation. The usability and feasibility of the tool was assessed by task completion rate, the System Usability Scale, and satisfaction questionnaires among 2 physicians and 24 adult stroke patients in an outpatient clinical setting.

Results

Rehabkompassen® identified and graphically visualized a panoramic view of the stroke patients' multidimensional needs in individual- and group levels. The instrument appeared to be feasible and time efficient in clinical use with a 100% overall task completion rate for both patients and physicians. A majority of the patients reported that it was very easy or fairly easy to answer the digital questionnaires and to understand their own digital Rehab-Compass graph. Two physicians reported a high mean score on the System Usability Scale (95/100) and were positive about using the tool in the future.

Conclusions

The current results indicated that Rehabkompassen® was a feasible, useful, and time-saving follow-up tool for the identification of rehabilitation needs among stroke survivors in the post-acute continuum of care after stroke. Further research is needed to evaluate the efficacy of the digital instrument among stroke patients.

Establishing a carotid artery stenosis disease cohort for comparative effectiveness research using natural language processing

OBJECTIVE

Investigation of asymptomatic carotid stenosis treatment is hindered by the lack of a contemporary population-based disease cohort. We describe the use of natural language processing (NLP) to identify stenosis in patients undergoing carotid imaging.

METHODS

Adult patients with carotid imaging between 2008 and 2012 in a large integrated health care system were identified and followed through 2017. An NLP process was developed to characterize carotid stenosis according to the Society of Radiologists in Ultrasound (for ultrasounds) and North American Symptomatic Carotid Endarterectomy Trial (NASCET) (for axial imaging) guidelines. The resulting algorithm assessed text descriptors to categorize normal/non-hemodynamically significant stenosis, moderate or severe stenosis as well as occlusion in both carotid ultrasound (US) and axial imaging (computed tomography and magnetic resonance angiography [CTA/MRA]). For US reports, internal carotid artery systolic and diastolic velocities and velocity ratios were assessed and matched for laterality to supplement accuracy. To validate the NLP algorithm, positive predictive value (PPV or precision) and sensitivity (recall) were calculated from simple random samples from the population of all imaging studies. Lastly, all non-normal studies were manually reviewed for confirmation for prevalence estimates and disease cohort assembly.

RESULTS

A total of 95,896 qualifying index studies (76,276 US and 19,620 CTA/MRA) were identified among 94,822 patients including 1059 patients who underwent multiple studies on the same day. For studies of normal/non-hemodynamically significant stenosis arteries, the NLP algorithm showed excellent performance with a PPV of 99% for US and 96.5% for CTA/MRA. PPV/sensitivity to identify a non-normal artery with correct laterality in the CTA/MRA and US samples were 76.9% (95% confidence interval [CI], 74.1%-79.5%)/93.1% (95% CI, 91.1%-94.8%) and 74.7% (95% CI, 69.3%-79.5%)/94% (95% CI, 90.2%-96.7%), respectively. Regarding cohort assembly, 15,522 patients were identified with diseased carotid artery, including 2674 exhibiting equal bilateral disease. This resulted in a laterality-specific cohort with 12,828 moderate, 5283 severe, and 1895 occluded arteries and 326 diseased arteries with unknown stenosis. During follow-up, 30.1% of these patients underwent 61,107 additional studies.

CONCLUSIONS

Use of NLP to detect carotid stenosis or occlusion can result in accurate exclusion of normal/non-hemodynamically significant stenosis disease states with more moderate precision with lesion identification, which can substantially reduce the need for manual review. The resulting cohort allows for efficient research and holds promise for similar reporting in other vascular diseases.

Identifying Unmet Rehabilitation Needs in Patients After Stroke With a Graphic Rehab-CompassTM

BACKGROUND

Unmet rehabilitation needs are common among stroke survivors. We aimed to evaluate whether a comprehensive graphic "Rehab-Compass," a novel combination of structured patient-reported outcome measures, was feasible and useful in facilitating a capture of patients' rehabilitation needs in clinical practice.

METHODS

A new graphic overview of broad unmet rehabilitation needs covers deficits in functioning, daily activity, participation, and quality of life. It was constructed by using 5 patient-oriented, well-validated, and reliable existing instruments with converted data into a 0 (worst outcome) to 100 (best outcome) scale but unchanged in terms of variable properties. Satisfaction of the Rehab-Compass^TM was studied by a qualitative interview of 9 patients with stroke and 3 clinicians. Practical feasibility and capacity of the instrument were evaluated in a cross-sectionalstudy with 48 patients at 5-month follow-ups after subarachnoid hemorrhage.

RESULTS

The Rehab-Compass^TM identified and graphically visualized a panoramic view of the multidimensional needs over time which was completed before clinical consultation. The Rehab-Compass^TM appeared to be feasible and time-efficientin clinical use. The interviews of both patients and clinicians showed high satisfaction when using the Rehab-Compass^TM graph. In the studied stroke patients, the Rehab-Compass^TM identified memory and processing information, fatigue, mood, and pain after subarachnoid hemorrhage as the most common problems.

CONCLUSIONS

The graphic Rehab-Compass^TM seems to be a feasible, useful, and time-saving tool for identification of unmet rehabilitation needs among stroke survivors in clinical practice. Further research is needed to make the Rehab-Compass^TM more concise and evaluate the instrument among different stroke subgroups.

Advances and challenges in treatment and prevention of ischemic stroke

We review recent advances in the treatment and prevention of acute ischemic stroke, including the current state of endovascular therapy, in light of 5 randomized controlled trials published this past year. Although no benefit of endovascular therapy over intravenous (IV) recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA) has been demonstrated, endovascular therapy is an appropriate treatment for acute ischemic stroke patients within the t-PA window who are ineligible for IV t-PA but have a large vascular occlusion. These trials reveal promises and current limitations of endovascular therapy, and comparison of reperfusion therapies remains an important area of research. One common theme is the strong association between a faster time to reperfusion, improved outcome, and reduced mortality. Primary and secondary stroke prevention trials emphasize the importance of aggressive management of medical risk factors as part of any preventative strategy. New oral anticoagulants, for example, offer cost-effective risk reduction in patients with atrial fibrillation, and may represent an opportunity for those with cryptogenic stroke. We highlight areas of unmet need and promising research in stroke, including the need to deliver proven therapies to more patients, and the need to recruit patients into clinical trials that better define the role of endovascular and other stroke therapies. Finally, improvement in strategies to recover speech, cognition, and motor function has the potential to benefit far more stroke patients than any acute stroke therapy, and represents the greatest opportunity for research in the coming century.