Conditions: Ischemic Stroke
Keywords: Ischemic stroke treatment recovery donepezil Aricept
Allocation: NA | Intervention model: SINGLE_GROUP
Enrollment: 33
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
This study involves treating patients that have suffered an acute ischemic stroke with the medication donepezil (Aricept ®). The hypothesis is that taking donepezil (FDA-approved for the treatment of Alzheimer's Disease) for the first 90 days following a stroke enhances recovery.

Detailed description:
We hypothesize that donepezil (5 mg per day, titrated up to 10 mg per day as tolerated) will enhance recovery following stroke by improving attention, learning and memory thereby enhancing rehabilitation. The null hypothesis is that the probability of a favorable outcome among post-stroke donepezil users is equal to that observed among similar participants in an existing National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) resource, the Phase III clinical trial of Tissue Plasminogen Activator (tPA) for acute ischemic stroke. The NINDS tPA stroke trial has been used as historical control data in pilot trials of reperfusion and neuroprotection.

The MASTER trial will be a multicenter, single-arm NINDS Recominant tPA trial-controlled, modified 2-stage adaptive clinical trial set in 2 tertiary care hospitals in the United States. Participants will be men and women with acute (\< 24 hours of onset of symptoms) ischemic stroke. A favorable outcome will be defined as National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) values of 0 or 1 at 90 days post-stroke.

Arms:
arm 1: Participants received treatment with donepezil within 24 hours after the onset of ischemic stroke symptoms. Participants received donepezil 5 mg/day for 30 days, followed by an increase to 10 mg/day for 60 days.

Interventions: intervention 1: Donepezil
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: Study participants will be treated with donepezil orally at an initial dose of 5 mg daily for the first 4 weeks, then increased at their 30-day visit by 5 mg to a maximum dose of 10 mg daily, if tolerated. If the participant does not tolerate the 10 mg dose, they will remain on 5 mg through the course of the study.

Protocol document: