In August, an 80-year-old woman walked into the emergency room at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. She was lucid but experiencing a stroke. Within minutes, doctors asked for permission to pull out the stroke-causing clot before any more brain damage could occur.

She hesitated. The procedure was part of a clinical trial, and she’d heard about a federal freeze on research grants to UCLA. She wanted to know: Would this study be at risk, potentially affecting her care?

Those worries put unnecessary pressure on a patient facing the loss of roughly 2 million nerve cells every minute that treatment was delayed, said Jeffrey Saver, a neurologist and longtime stroke researcher.

“To then have to worry about what’s happening with the funding from the federal government is a needless increase in

See Full Page