Robarts co-founder receives Karolinska Stroke Award

Barnett will receive the prize from the President of Karolinska Institutet Harriet Wallberg-Henriksson during the Karolinska Stroke Update meeting in Stockholm, Sweden on Nov. 17. The Karolinska Institutet also awards the Nobel Prize annually.

 

Barnett’s extraordinary contributions to stroke research have changed the management of millions of stroke patients. The implementation of his research has prevented an unaccountable number of strokes.

For younger colleagues, he was an enthusiastic coordinator of the North American Symptomatic Carotid Endarterectomy Trial (NASCET). Together with a European study of similar design, this trial provided the scientific evidence for operation on tight atherosclerotic manifestations on the carotid artery of the neck.

It has become one of the most important interventions to prevent recurrent stroke after transient or mild cerebrovascular warning symptoms.
 
Before the NASCET study, Barnett was leading another extensive trial, with quite a different outcome. In North America, clinics were established to perform extracranial-intracranial (EC-IC) bypass surgery in patients with total occlusion of one of the major supplies to the brain, the internal carotid artery.

Through an opening of the skull bone, arteries on the outside of the skull were connected with those on the surface of the brain. The EC-IC bypass study showed that these operations did not benefit patients and in the mid 1980s, these operations were almost totally stopped.

Even earlier, in 1970, Barnett was leading the Canadian Aspirin Trial which established, for the first time, that any antiplatelet drug could prevent diseases (in this case stroke) due to arterial thrombosis.

A University of Toronto graduate, Barnett became a neurologist at the Toronto General Hospital. In 1969 he was invited to become the Chief of the Division of Neurology at Western and Victoria Hospital.

From 1974 to 1984 he served as Chairman of the Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences at the university and, in 1986, co-founded the Robarts and was named its first Scientific Director.