Enbrel4stroke

In spite of the information that one can easily find suggesting Enbrel (etanercept) is useful for recovery  from stroke, there is little to find about this.

I could locate this article:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21254790

which merely talks about 3 patients who seemed to benefit from the drug. The author is someone who is running a private clinic to give this drug.

This is an off-label use of this drug

This means it is not an FDA-approved usage for it, and you won't find anything about this usage on the company's site.

http://www.enbrel.com/index.jspx

It is worth going there to see the various serious risks of this drug, even when it is used for approved reasons.

This therefore means that anyone who receives it will have to pay out of pocket for it. Doctors that are promoting it seem to have set up clinics to make money from giving this medication. Many of the links you will find if you search for example "Enbrel and stroke" will link you to these doctors.

What does it take for a drug to be approved for this kind of use?

The company that sells the drug would need to start a placebo-controlled treatment trial, enrolling a large number of patients to try to prove safety and effectiveness of this treatment.

Usually, we would expect some animal studies to be done first. There are a number of experimental ways of causing strokes in animals, and these can be much more easily measured than with people.

Over the years we have seen clinics set up to give unapproved treatments for various neurologic illness, like stroke, Alzheimer's disease, MS, spinal cord injury. As of yet, I have not seen any of these things end up showing benefit, and patients and their families have spent large sums of money for nothing.

How can a person tell whether some treatment like this might be useful or at least is being investigated?

Your best bet is to go to reliable sources for this information, such as the American Stroke Association, the National Stroke Association, the American Academy of Neurology, the National Institute of Health (NIH), or various well-known hospitals and clinics who have information and news for patients.

So Enbrel is bad for stroke?

I think it's best to say, "We don't know enough yet." It's certainly worth keeping an eye out for signs that someone is doing a legitimate study about this, but I would not recommend that anyone go to one of these clinics at this time.

Gregory Pittman, MD