RESEARCH ARTICLE
Prevention Strategies for Cardioembolic Stroke: Present and Future Perspectives
Giacomo Giacalone*, 1, Mohammed Abballa Abbas1, 2, Francesco Corea*, 1, 3
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2010Volume: 4
First Page: 56
Last Page: 63
Publisher ID: TONEUJ-4-56
DOI: 10.2174/1874205X01004010056
Article History:
Received Date: 11/5/2009Revision Received Date: 21/12/2009
Acceptance Date: 23/12/2009
Electronic publication date: 15/6/2010
Collection year: 2010

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cause of cardioembolism. An update on secondary prevention strategies, used to protect patients from the risk of stroke in many common cardiac conditions, is presented in the paper. The main line of actions of stroke prevention in cardioembolism is mostly connected with antithrombotic drugs, but also other, more invasive, techniques are quickly emerging. Also the classic pharmacological prevention with coumarins may soon be overcome by new generation anticoagulants. Is an aggressive treatment of Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO) always recommended? One of the main challenges of the future years will be to understand competitiveness between old and new preventive strategies.