Intravenous Thrombolysis Does Not Modify Endovascular Therapy for MDVO Strokes - HCPLive

News|Videos|October 22, 2026 Fabiano Cavalcante, MD, discusses his secondary analysis of the DISTAL trial, which revealed minimal association between IVT and the effect of EVT in MDVO strokes. Presented at the World Stroke Congress (WSC) 2026 in Seoul, South Korea, by Fabiano Cavalcante, MD, a PhD candidate at Amsterdam UMC and founder of Citadel Medical Sciences, these exploratory data may indicate that the threshold for procedural intervention in distal occlusions may be higher than previously believed.1“It’s very important that these results should be interpreted carefully,” Cavalcante told HCPLive in an exclusive interview. “I think they are more on the hypothesis-generating side than actually on the treatment decision side. We need more evidence from pooling these trials together to have a larger sample size or randomizing further patients, especially now that we know the results of the first 3 trials that didn’t show a clear benefit.”DISTAL was an open-label, randomized trial conducted across 56 locations worldwide.