A trial of endovascular therapy in patients with a basilar-artery occlusion has failed to prove direct clot removal produces a better functional outcome than standard medical therapy.

In the randomised trial of 300 patients, reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, 44.2% of those assigned to endovascular treatment had a favourable function outcome compared with 37.7% of those in the medical care group.

But the difference between the two results was not statistically significant, the authors said.

“A larger trial might have been positive,” said senior study author Dr Wouter Schonewille, a vascular neurologist at St Antonius Hospital, in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands.