Carotid endarterectomy. Bright light at the end of the tunnel.

Arecent issue of Stroke contained descriptions of two more direction signals along the misty road that has been travelled by those seeking the rightful place for carotid endarterectomy in stroke prevention. One was described by the North American Symptomatic CarotidEndarterectomy Trial (NASCET) investigators i n t h e i r r e p o r t o f t design and ongoing execution of the North American multicenter randomized trial funded by the National Institutes of Health to evaluate this procedure as applied to symptomatic disease. The other was represented by a reprinting of the Clinical Alert issued by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NTNDS) ^S ^ medical practitioners