Tranexamic acid for hyperacute primary IntraCerebral Haemorrhage (TICH-2): an international randomised, placebo-controlled, phase 3 superiority trial

BackgroundTranexamic acid (TXA) reduces death due to bleeding after trauma and post-partum haemorrhage. The aim was to assess if tranexamic acid reduces haematoma expansion and improves outcome in adults with stroke due to intracerebral 6 haemorrhage (ICH). MethodsWe undertook an international, randomised placebo-controlled trial in adults with intracerebral haemorrhage. Participants received 1g intravenous tranexamic acid bolus followed by an 8 hour 1g infusion, or matching placebo, within 8 hours of symptom onset. The primary outcome was functional status at day 90, measured by shift in the modified Rankin Scale (mRS), using ordinal logistic regression, with adjustment for stratification and minimisation criteria. All analyses were performed on an intention to treat basis. This trial is registered as ISRCTN93732214.FindingsWe recruited 2,325 participants (TXA 1161, placebo 1164) from 124 hospitals in 12 countries between 2013 and 2017. Treatment groups were well balanced at baseline. The primary outcome was determined for 2307 (99·2%) participants. There was no statistically significant difference between the groups for the primary outcome of functional status at day 90 (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 0·88, 95% CI 0·76-1·03, p=0·11). Although there were fewer deaths by day 7 in the TXA group (aOR 0·73, 95% CI 0·53-0·99, p=0·0406), there was no difference in case fatality at 90 days (adjusted hazard ratio 0·92, 95% CI 0·77 to 1·10, p =0·37). There were fewer serious adverse events after TXA vs. placebo by days 2 (p=0·0272), 7 (p=0·0200) and 90 (p=0·0393).InterpretationThere was no significant difference in functional status 90 days after intracerebral haemorrhage with tranexamic acid, despite a reduction in early deaths and serious adverse events. Larger randomised trials are needed to confirm or refute a clinically significant treatment effect

Intravenous tranexamic acid for hyperacute primary intracerebral hemorrhage: protocol for a randomized, placebo-controlled trial

Rationale: Outcome after intracerebral hemorrhage remains poor. Tranexamic acid is easy to administer, readily available, inexpensive, and effective in other hemorrhagic conditions. Aim: This randomized trial aims to test the hypothesis that intravenous tranexamic acid given within 8 h of spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage reduces death or dependency. Design: Phase III prospective double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial. Participants within 8 h of spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage are randomized to receive either intravenous tranexamic acid 1 g 10 min bolus followed by 1 g 8 h infusion, or placebo. Sample size estimates: A trial of 2000 participants (300 from start-up phase and 1700 from main phase) will have 90% power to detect an ordinal shift of the modified Rankin Scale with odds ratio 0.79. Study outcomes: The primary outcome is death or dependency measured by ordinal shift analysis of the 7 level mRS at day 90. Secondary outcomes are neurological impairment at day 7 and disability, quality of life, cognition, and mood at day 90. Safety outcomes are death, serious adverse events, thromboembolic events, and seizures. Cost outcomes are length of stay in hospital, readmission, and institutionalization. Discussion: This pragmatic trial is assessing efficacy of tranexamic acid after spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage. Recruitment started in 2013; as of 15th January 2016 1355 participants have been enrolled, from 95 centers in seven countries. Recruitment is due to end in 2017. TICH-2 Trial is registered as ISRCTN93732214

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Early toll-like receptor 4 blockade reduces ROS and inflammation triggered by microglial pro-inflammatory phenotype in rodent and human brain ischaemia models

Background and Purpose Ischaemic stroke is a leading cause of death, disability, and a high unmet medical need. Post-reperfusion inflammation and an up-regulation of toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), an upstream sensor of innate immunity, are associated with poor outcome in stroke patients. Here, we identified the therapeutic effect of targeting the LPS/TLR4 signal transduction pathway. Experimental Approach We tested the effect of the TLR4 inhibitor, eritoran (E5564) in different in vitro ischaemia-related models: human organotypic cortex culture, rat organotypic hippocampal cultures, and primary mixed glia cultures. We explored the therapeutic window of E5564 in the transient middle cerebral artery occlusion model of cerebral ischaemia in mice. Key Results In vivo, administration of E5564 1 and 4 hr post-ischaemia reduced the expression of different pro-inflammatory chemokines and cytokines, infarct volume, blood-brain barrier breakdown, and improved neuromotor function, an important clinically relevant outcome. In the human organotypic cortex culture, E5564 reduced the activation of microglia and ROS production evoked by LPS. Conclusion and Implications TLR4 signalling has a causal role in the inflammation associated with a poor post-stroke outcome. Importantly, its inhibition by eritoran (E5564) provides neuroprotection both in vitro and in vivo, including in human tissue, suggesting a promising new therapeutic approach for ischaemic stroke

Outcomes in Antiplatelet‐Associated Intracerebral Hemorrhage in the TICH‐2 Randomized Controlled Trial

BackgroundAntiplatelet therapy increases the risk of hematoma expansion in intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) while the effect on functional outcome is uncertain.Methods and ResultsThis is an exploratory analysis of the TICH‐2 (Tranexamic Acid in Intracerebral Hemorrhage‐2) double‐blind, randomized, placebo‐controlled trial, which studied the efficacy of tranexamic acid in patients with spontaneous ICH within 8 hours of onset. Multivariable logistic regression and ordinal regression were performed to explore the relationship between pre‐ICH antiplatelet therapy, and 24‐hour hematoma expansion and day 90 modified Rankin Scale score, as well as the effect of tranexamic acid. Of 2325 patients, 611 (26.3%) had pre‐ICH antiplatelet therapy. They were older (mean age, 75.7 versus 66.5 years), more likely to have ischemic heart disease (25.4% versus 2.7%), ischemic stroke (36.2% versus 6.3%), intraventricular hemorrhage (40.2% versus 27.5%), and larger baseline hematoma volume (mean, 28.1 versus 22.6 mL) than the no‐antiplatelet group. Pre‐ICH antiplatelet therapy was associated with a significantly increased risk of hematoma expansion (adjusted odds ratio [OR], 1.28; 95% CI, 1.01–1.63), a shift toward unfavorable outcome in modified Rankin Scale (adjusted common OR, 1.58; 95% CI, 1.32–1.91) and a higher risk of death at day 90 (adjusted OR, 1.63; 95% CI, 1.25–2.11). Tranexamic acid reduced the risk of hematoma expansion in the overall patients with ICH (adjusted OR, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.62–0.93) and antiplatelet subgroup (adjusted OR, 0.61; 95% CI, 0.41–0.91) with no significant interaction between pre‐ICH antiplatelet therapy and tranexamic acid (P interaction=0.248).ConclusionsAntiplatelet therapy is independently associated with hematoma expansion and unfavorable functional outcome. Tranexamic acid reduced hematoma expansion regardless of prior antiplatelet therapy use

The effects of blood pressure and tranexamic acid in spontaneous intracerebral haemorrhage: a secondary analysis of a large randomised controlled trial

BackgroundTranexamic acid reduced haematoma expansion and early death, but did not improve functional outcome in the tranexamic acid for hyperacute spontaneous intracerebral haemorrhage-2 (TICH-2) trial. In a predefined subgroup, there was a statistically significant interaction between prerandomisation baseline systolic blood pressure (SBP) and the effect of tranexamic acid on functional outcome (p=0.019).MethodsTICH-2 was an international prospective double-blind placebo-controlled randomised trial evaluating intravenous tranexamic acid in patients with acute spontaneous intracerebral haemorrhage (ICH). Prerandomisation baseline SBP was split into predefined ≤170 and >170 mm Hg groups. The primary outcome at day 90 was the modified Rankin Scale (mRS), a measure of dependency, analysed using ordinal logistic regression. Haematoma expansion was defined as an increase in haematoma volume of >33% or >6 mL from baseline to 24 hours. Data are OR or common OR (cOR) with 95% CIs, with significance at pResultsOf 2325 participants in TICH-2, 1152 had baseline SBP≤170 mm Hg and were older, had larger lobar haematomas and were randomised later than 1173 with baseline SBP>170 mm Hg. Tranexamic acid was associated with a favourable shift in mRS at day 90 in those with baseline SBP≤170 mm Hg (cOR 0.73, 95% CI 0.59 to 0.91, p=0.005), but not in those with baseline SBP>170 mm Hg (cOR 1.05, 95% CI 0.85 to 1.30, p=0.63). In those with baseline SBP≤170 mm Hg, tranexamic acid reduced haematoma expansion (OR 0.62, 95% CI 0.47 to 0.82, p=0.001), but not in those with baseline SBP>170 mm Hg (OR 1.02, 95% CI 0.77 to 1.35, p=0.90).ConclusionsTranexamic acid was associated with improved clinical and radiological outcomes in ICH patients with baseline SBP≤170 mm Hg. Further research is needed to establish whether certain subgroups may benefit from tranexamic acid in acute ICH.Trial registration numberISRCTN93732214