Stroke is the second most common cause of death around the world. It’s also a major reason people lose their ability to live a normal life, especially in developing countries. The number of new stroke cases, deaths due to stroke, and people living with stroke increased significantly from 1990 to 2019.
There has been some progress in finding ways to manage stroke in patients who have had a stroke or are at high risk. But only a few immediate treatments have been shown to help: thrombolysis, endovascular thrombectomy, hemicraniectomy, stroke unit care, and aspirin. There’s still a need for more treatments that can improve results and can be used widely for stroke.
Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the best way to find out if treatments work. But traditional RCTs are often expensive, need a lot of resources, and take a lot of time because they only test one treatment at a time with fixed assumptions. On the other hand, platform trials can test many treatments at the same time and can add or remove treatments during the trial, which is more efficient. In the ongoing search for the best treatment methods for stroke patients, platform trials are seen as a promising new approach in stroke research. They have the potential to change the way stroke clinical research is done, leading to quicker and more effective treatments for this life-threatening disease.
As an adaptive platform trial, the main goal of ACT-GLOBAL is to find the treatment or treatments that are most likely to help stroke patients get better.
