A 37-year-old devoted runner, Cory Root, PhD, seemed an unlikely candidate for an acute stroke. But in the midst of a seven-mile jog along the Hudson River in early March, he suddenly felt weak and began to drag his foot. After he fell and struggled to get up, several onlookers rushed to his side. “They thought I showed signs of a stroke and called an ambulance,” recalls Dr. Root, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Columbia University. “I thought that was crazy because I was too young for a stroke.”

Dr. Root was brought to Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, where he was evaluated by vascular neurologist Carolyn Brockington, MD, Director of the Stroke Center, who confirmed that he had a large vessel occlusion in the brain. Dr. Brockington and her specially trained stroke team quickly administered intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), a medicine designed to dissolve clots stemming from an acute ischemic stroke.

For additional intervention, they called in Johanna Fifi, MD, Assistant Professor of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Radiology, who performed a thrombectomy, a newly proven minimally invasive endovascular procedure that Mount Sinai has helped to pioneer nationally. Mount Sinai’s unique endovascular stroke team can deploy to hospitals within the Mount Sinai Health System and ensure the fastest possible time to treatment.

During the procedure, Dr. Fifi inserted a catheter through a small incision in the groin and snaked it through blood vessels to the site of the clot in the brain. A vacuum-like suction canister was then attached to the clot, dislodging and removing it, and restoring blood flow to Dr. Root’s occluded artery within minutes.

“In the last couple of years, the new generation of endovascular devices has become a game changer for patients,” says Dr. Fifi, who is also Director of the Endovascular Stroke Program at the Mount Sinai Health System. She says the devices—including stent retrievers that use a wire mesh to ensnare the clot in order to extract it—are effective in about 80 percent of cases. “We often see patients improving as soon as we pull the clot out.”

J Mocco, MD, Director of the Mount Sinai Health System’s Cerebrovascular Center and Professor and Vice Chair for Education, Department of Neurosurgery, says Mount Sinai has conducted recent clinical trials that support the use of endovascular clot removal. “We’ve been leading the conversation internationally and generating the data needed to prove the benefits of endovascular treatment,” says Dr. Mocco. “The good news for patients is that if someone has a major stroke with a blockage of a large brain artery, there are now clear indications that this time-sensitive therapy can dramatically improve the likelihood they will get better.”

Following Dr. Root’s 25-minute procedure, there was immediate and significant improvement in his symptoms. He was back at work and back running along the Hudson River just weeks afterward.

“The more I think about it, the more I realize how lucky I was to get the kind of treatment I did at St. Luke’s,” he says. “Even my advisor at Columbia (Nobel laureate Richard Axel, MD) told me he was impressed with the first-rate medical care I received.”