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Mr O'Connell said the TPA backed the Labour government's review of quangos, and urged more focus on scrapping unnecessary functions and bringing delivery of significant services back under political control.

And when stroke patients are taken to an emergency room, the first treatment doctors often consider is a clot-dissolving medicine called tPA, which can make brain bleeding worse.

In addition, Schrag said, some patients given the placebo had to wait longer for the standard stroke treatment of the drug tPA or surgery to dissolve the blood clot.

A table in the published final trial report seems to indicate that some of the placebo patients even got tPA outside of the American Stroke Association–approved window of no more than 4.5 hours after acute ischemic stroke.

Among other evidence cited, it reduced the volume of brain tissue damaged by the stroke and stopped some bleeding caused by tPA.