Dr. Kruyt said the results can be extrapolated to the U.S. and other regions because the rates of sLAVO and other outcomes are similar to rates reported elsewhere.

“Of interest,” he noted, “EMS workers did not receive focused training before the study commenced and therefore the feasibility of the scales of about 70-80 percent will likely be the same elsewhere, since in most regions the protocols for stroke code patients are similar. We do think that with focused training, assessment of some clinical scales items can be improved – for example assessment of neglect and motor function.”

Dr. Kori Zachrison of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, coauthor of a related editorial, said the study is “very important (and) advances the science.”

“The process of prehospital triage in stroke systems of care is really complex and also very dependent on local and regional circumstances,” he commented in an email to Reuters Health. “At the same time, optimizing prehospital stroke triage entails more than simply choosing the best prehospital stroke scale. There are many other critical factors in the equation, for example, understanding local geography, available hospitals options in an area and their stroke-related resources.”

“Thoughtfully organizing our stroke systems depends on so many of these things, and one critical piece is having an understanding of test characteristics of the prehospital stroke scales that (the authors) provide,” he concluded.