Table of contents:
- Get to know citicoline drugs
- Is citicoline safe for stroke patients?
- What are the benefits of citicoline for stroke patients?
Hearing the term stroke may be familiar to your ears. Stroke is a syndrome caused by a cerebral blood circulation disorder that occurs acutely and is characterized by neurological disorders. Stroke is the number one cause of disability in the world and the number three cause of death in the world.
Various treatments are carried out to prevent the symptoms that are caused from getting worse. One of the drugs that is often used in stroke sufferers is citicoline.
Get to know citicoline drugs
Citicoline (cytidine-5′-diphosphocholine or CDP-choline) is a compound that was discovered by Kennedy in 1956. The compound contains 2 important molecules, namely cytidine and choline, which is a component of one of the constituent cell membranes.
Citicoline medicine has been widely studied and has benefits for brain health. This drug works to prevent brain damage (neuroprotection) and helps the formation of cell membranes in the brain (neurorepair). Therefore citicoline functions as a neuroprotection and neurorepair, the drug is often given to stroke sufferers. However, there is still debate about the significant benefits of using citicoline.
Is citicoline safe for stroke patients?
Citicoline seems to be a debatable drug whether it is actually beneficial for stroke. Various studies have been conducted to test the effects of citicoline. Research that has been done shows that citicoline is safe to use for stroke sufferers.
According to research published in the Journal of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease, the use of citicoline to treat stroke is acceptable and may be of benefit to reduce stroke severity. However, the basic stroke treatment itself, such as treatment of ischemic stroke using thrombolysis, is still better than the use of citicoline alone.
Research conducted by the International Citicoline Trial on Acute Stroke (ICTUS) suggests that the use of citicoline does not provide beneficial results for patients who have had a stroke. From the results of these studies, doubts arise whether citicoline should actually be used for stroke sufferers or not. However, it should be noted that in the ICTUS study, the target study was patients with acute ischemic stroke.
Although these studies provide unsupportive results for the use of citicoline in patients with acute ischemic stroke, it turns out that the use of citicoline is sufficient to provide good results in elderly stroke patients and in patients who do not receive thrombolysis therapy.
What are the benefits of citicoline for stroke patients?
Although there are studies that say that citicoline is not very useful for acute ischemic stroke, it turns out that citicoline can improve the decline in thinking (cognitive) abilities after a stroke. One of the studies that looked at the usefulness of citicoline was a study conducted by Alvarez-Sabin and colleagues.
Based on the results of this study, it was found that the use of citicoline for 12 months in patients who had the first ischemic stroke was proven to be safe and can be effective in correcting decreased thinking power after a stroke.
