NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 1, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Three stroke researchers with significant contributions to understanding stroke; two "new investigators" and an emergency medicine researcher will be honored by the American Stroke Association at the International Stroke Conference 2012.
Wolf-Dieter Heiss, M.D., emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research and emeritus chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University of Cologne in Germany will be honored for his lifetime contributions to the investigation, management, mentorship and community service in the basic or clinical stroke field. He will be given the David G. Sherman Lecture Award.
Gregory J. del Zoppo, M.D., a professor of medicine (in hematology) at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle will receive the Thomas Willis Award for basic science investigations and management of stroke.
Jeffrey L. Saver, M.D., professor of neurology at the University of California-Los Angeles' Geffen School of Medicine and director of the UCLA Stroke Center, will receive the William Feinberg Award for Excellence in Clinical Stroke for ongoing contributions to clinical science investigation and management of stroke.
Amytis Towfighi, M.D., assistant professor of neurology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and Chair of the Neurology Department at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center receives the Robert G. Siekert New Investigator in Stroke Award.
Cheryl Lin, B.S., medical doctoral candidate at the Duke-NUS GMS Singapore and the Duke Clinical Research Institute in Durham, N.C. will receive the Stroke Care in Emergency Medicine Award.
Amrou Sarraj, M.D., Vascular Neurology Fellow at the University of Texas at Houston, receives the Mordecai Y.T. Globus New Investigator Award.
The Sherman Award honors Dr. David G. Sherman, a prominent stroke physician and internationally recognized leader and researcher in stroke prevention and treatment. It is now bestowed on a senior American Heart Association Stroke Council Fellow with outstanding contributions in the basic or clinical stroke field in their lifetime.
Heiss is recognized for 40 years of research – including basic research that was translated to patient care. He delineated blood flow thresholds, their impact on tissue vulnerability, potential for functional reversibility, and the transition from reversibility to tissue death or recovery from stroke.
He conducted groundbreaking PET studies on stroke patients that lead to a richer understanding of the biochemistry and physiology of stroke. He and his group used PET technology and MRI to develop threshold maps for tissue viability and the extent and duration of the penumbra, the area of the brain injured by stroke that can still be salvaged.
This increased stroke knowledge and "contributed to our ability to make in every stroke patient reliable and systematic assessment of risk versus benefit decisions," said one of Heiss's nominators Antoine M. Hakim, M.D., professor of neurology at the University of Ottawa in Canada. "This knowledge has also changed the way we teach stroke, has made the entire field more appealing to the next generation of scientists and practitioners and has imposed new realities on our stroke care infrastructure."
He has served as a section editor for Stroke: Journal of the American Heart Association and on the advisory board for several scientific journals. The Austria native was the first non-American member of the International Stroke Conference planning committee. He is a long standing member of the AHA Stroke Council.
Heiss will give the Sherman Award Lecture — "The Role of Positron Emission Tomography for Translational Research in Stroke" — on Friday, Feb. 3, at 11:32 a.m. CT.
The Willis Award now recognizes an American Heart Association Stroke Council Fellow who has "actively engaged in and has made significant contributions to basic science research (animal/cell models) in stroke." It honors a pioneer physician Thomas Willis (1621-1675) who is credited with providing the first detailed descriptions of the brain stem, cerebellum and ventricles along with hypotheses on their function.
del Zoppo is recognized for his "unmatched perspective" as a clinical and basic expert in thrombosis and cerebral vascular biology in the setting of stroke. He has made fundamental discoveries in understanding brain vessel thrombosis and the microvessel responses that contribute to stroke. His contributions date back 30 years, when as a junior investigator he initiated, designed and led three of the first multicenter, international prospective trials of clot busters for ischemic stroke patients. These were the first trials of acute intra-arterial and intravenous plasminogen activator in North America, when clot busting for heart attack was beginning to be recognized as a potential treatment and the concept was new to neurology.
Today, intravenous tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) is the only U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment for acute ischemic stroke.
del Zoppo has illuminated how microvessels in the brain respond to reduced blood flow. His group formulated the conceptual framework of the "neurovascular unit," which are the interactions of basic cerebral functions after stroke.
"No single person who is not a neurologist has contributed more to the stroke field than Dr. del Zoppo," said Jaroslaw Aronowski, M.S., Ph.D., a University of Texas-Houston neurology professor who nominated del Zoppo.
del Zoppo will deliver the Willis Lecture, "Toward the Neurovascular Unit: A Journey in Clinical Translation," on Wednesday, Feb. 1, at 11:52 a.m. CT.
del Zoppo is an active member of numerous national and international societies in neurology, internal medicine and vascular biology. He has participated on several American Heart Association/American Stroke Association committees, designs and participates in acute stroke trials and and reviews research projects in North America and Europe.
The Feinberg Award is named for Dr. William Feinberg (1952-1997), a prominent stroke clinician-researcher and American Heart Association volunteer who contributed to a fuller understanding of the causes of stroke. The award recognizes a Stroke Council Fellow actively involved in patient-based research, who has made significant contributions to clinical stroke research.
Saver, a stroke physician and scientist for nearly 20 years, has been a principal investigator or co-investigator in numerous national and international trials spanning a spectrum of stroke care. He has made many pioneering contributions, including advancing the pre-hospital identification and treatment of stroke, modernizing the definition of transient ischemic attack, developing methods to analyze the whole range of post-stroke deficits in clinical trials, showing that rapid restoration of blood flow can reverse acute stroke brain injury, and developing clot retrieval devices to reopen blocked cerebral arteries in acute stroke.
Saver's masterwork may be as the principal investigator of National Institute of Health FAST-MAG trial in which paramedics are giving potentially brain protective magnesium to patients within the first minutes after stroke onset, said Michael T. Froehler, M.D., Ph.D. and David S. Liebeskind, M.D., who nominated Saver.
"He has devoted immense effort to stroke care beginning in the field with EMS…creating the Los Angeles Pre-Hospital Stroke Screen, which has become a paradigm for other centers across the country and has then empowered EMS and shortened time-to-treatment by developing a randomized trial of intravenous magnesium versus placebo for the treatment of acute ischemic stroke."
In addition, Saver has trained more than 20 neurology fellows and created the UCLA Visiting Scholars Program for international vascular neuroscientists to perform clinical research within the UCLA stroke center.
Saver has been an active member of the American Heart Association's Stroke Council, serving on executive and planning committees and guideline and statement writing groups. He has been an editor for more than 10 journals and currently serves on numerous journal editorial boards.
Saver will give the Feinberg lecture — "Treatment Swift and Treatment Sure: Prehospital Neuroprotection and Highly Effective Endovascular Recanalization Therapy for Acute Ischemic Stroke," on Thursday, Feb. 2, at 12:05 p.m. CT.
The three other awards recognize noteworthy research presented by young investigators at this year's International Stroke Conference. All applicants must be AHA Council members.
The Siekert Award is named for the founding chair of the International Stroke Conference Robert G. Siekert and is presented to an outstanding young scientist. Towfighi is recognized for abstract 204 High Framingham Cardiovascular Risk Scores are of Prognostic Value in Recent Ischemic Stroke Patients without known Coronary Heart Disease. It will be presented Wednesday. Feb. 1, at 11:35 a.m. CT. It concluded that more than one-third of ischemic stroke patients without known heart disease have a high Framingham score ― suggesting a higher risk of major vascular event within years.
The Emergency Medicine Award is for the highest scoring abstract among applicants in the emergency medicine category. Lin will present abstract 206 — Pre-notification by Emergency Medical Services is Associated with More Timely Evaluation and Treatment of Acute Ischemic Stroke on Thursday, Feb. 2, at 11:14 a.m. CT. The study found that EMS pre-notification is independently associated with more rapid patient imaging and increased timeliness in IV tPA administration. The results support the need for initiatives that increase EMS pre-notification rates to improve quality of care and outcomes in acute ischemic stroke.
The Globus Award is named for the late renowned cerebrovascular researcher Dr. Mordecai Y.T. Globus and is given to a researcher still in training. Sarraj's work — abstract 205 Optimizing Prediction Scores for Poor Outcome After Intra-arterial Therapy for Anterior Circulation Acute Ischemic Stroke will be presented Thursday, Feb. 2, at 11:01 a.m. CT. The study suggests that combining clinical and radiographic variables can better predict poor outcome after patients undergo intra-arterial clot busting. This work resulted in the Houston Intra-Arterial Therapy 2 "HIAT2" score."
The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association receives funding mostly from individuals. Foundations and corporations donate as well, and fund specific programs and events. Strict policies are enforced to prevent these relationships from influencing the association's science content. Financial information for the American Heart Association, including a list of contributions from pharmaceutical companies and device manufacturers, is available at www.heart.org/corporatefunding.
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NR12-1019 (ISC2012/Awards)
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