What Matters in the Results of Repeated Intravenous Thrombolysis for Recurrent Ischemic Stroke?

val 225 days and 45.9% female. Heavier severity and worse functional outcome were observed in the RT group, but the difference of intracranial hemorrhages (ICHs) from 2 events did not reach statistical significance. More ICHs occurred in RTs with prior stroke within last 30 days than those in chronic stroke phase in a subgroup analysis (25.0–4.9%, p = 0.018). Only National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) was significantly associated with a good functional outcome (OR 0.921, 95% CI 0.857–0.990) and ICH (OR 1.177, 95% CI 1.031–1.344) in the logistic regression analysis. Our literature review indicated that baseline stroke severity was the main predictor of the functional outcome and ICH Dear Sir, We read with interest the article by Laible et al. [1] regarding repeated thrombolysis (RT) for acute ischemic stroke (AIS). Although this study has attempted to address the efficacy and safety issue of RT, we strongly feel that one should be cautious in understanding the conclusion. Since the data of onset-to-treatment time were not collected in 33.3% cases and the sample size was also small, the conclusion cannot be considered powerful and authentic. We conducted a systemic literature review in PubMed up to December, 2015. A total of 15 studies [1–15] involving 57 cases and 61 RTs were collected. The details are shown in the ( table 1 ). The median age was 73 at the first event, the median time interReceived: December 22, 2015 Accepted: February 5, 2016 Published online: March 8, 2016