Dr. Jorge Pagola

My daily work involves clinical practice, teaching, and research. As a physician, I am a vascular neurologist, providing hospital care and on-call services. I specialize in cardioembolic stroke, both in its diagnosis and treatment. As an educator, I coordinate training in focused ultrasound at the national and international levels. My field of research has been the diagnosis and treatment of ischemic stroke. In my Doctoral Thesis in 2010 I defended the influence of advanced fibrinolytic treatment in the worst-prognosis stroke, basilar thrombosis. Later, already at the time of the development of thrombectomy, we published the usefulness of stent retrievers and in recent years I collaborated in the achievement and improvement of this type of treatment that has demonstrated the impact on clinical improvement and a reduction in mortality. In recent years, my field of research has focused on the diagnosis of the cause of stroke with advanced techniques, because in my opinion, it did not make sense to continue performing endovascular treatment and not knowing the origin of the stroke in up to 30% of cases. We have developed new diagnostic techniques that have been adapted to our daily clinical practice (wearable Holter, focused echocardiography, analysis of atrial deformability). In recent years, our group has continued to innovate in the detection of atrial fibrillation, now with smart bracelets that empower the patient in their self-care. In this effort to improve diagnosis, we have created a protocol for analyzing the thrombus extracted from acute cerebral occlusion. We have created lines of research to determine, through histological, immunohistochemical and proteomic analysis of the thrombus, the cause of the stroke and the response to both lytic drugs and endovascular therapy. Finally, we have created a new innovative line, cytometry of the thrombus extracted in thrombectomy of acute stroke. A technique that is faster and less expensive than the usual histological analysis and that has been shown to be able to identify thrombi of cardioembolic origin and those most resistant to recanalization.