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"MEDICAL DETECTIVE SEEKS CLUES TO UNDERSTANDING STROKE"
Steven R. Levine, M.D.
Director, Comprehensive Stroke Program
Even as a young boy, Steven Levine pictured himself helping others. But it took the world's first successful heart transplant, his affinity for math and sciences, and his skill as a competitive chess player to help him decide on a career in medicine. Today, Steven R. Levine, M.D. is an inter-nationally known neurologist specializing in the prevention and treatment of stroke.
Growing up on Long Island in the sixties, Levine was mesmerized when he heard that South African physicians had successfully transplanted a human heart. "I was so affected by it that I wanted to become a surgeon," he says. His interest switched to understanding how the brain works and blood disorders while attending medical school at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Levine's passion for playing chess made neurology a natural choice for a specialty. "Chess is all about visual-spatial relationships," he says, "and it also requires a great deal of logic."
Dr. Levine joined Harper University Hospital in 1998 and under his leadership the Detroit Medical Center's Stroke Program has become the largest, most comprehensive in Michigan and one of the nation's top ten centers for stroke. He has amassed a group of experts with sub-specialty training in stroke. "Years ago, there was nothing you could do to prevent or treat a stroke," he says, "all we could do was treat the symptoms." Today Levine and his team focus on preventing stroke, keeping stroke from recurring, intervening at the time of stroke, and helping patients to regain skills lost during a stroke.
"Two-thirds of all strokes could be prevented if we controlled all risk factors," he says. With that in mind, Levine and his colleagues developed a comprehensive screening project known as STRAP-The Stroke Risk and Assessment Program. He is also working to broaden the impact of the Stroke Program by using the technology of telemedicine ("Telestroke") to work with doctors in remote hospitals to diagnose and treat stroke. The stroke program offers quite a large number of acute therapeutic and prevention options for their patients, tailored to their individual risk factor profiles.
Dr. Levine is a Professor of Neurology at Wayne State University. He was a leading investigator in the NINDS rt-PA Stroke Trial. The study tested tissue plasminogen activator or TPA-the first government approved medication for treating acute ischemic stroke. He has received numerous awards and honors, including Best Doctors in America. Dr. Levine is a Fellow in the Royal Society of Medicine and the American Academy of Neurology and is an elected member of the American Neurological Association. He is on the editorial board of Stroke and is the editor of the National Stroke Association's Stroke-Clinical Updates. He has published more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles in the field of stroke and speaks internationally on stroke. He currently has NIH/NINDS funding to study the role of antiphospholipid antibodies, proteins in the blood, in causing recurrent stroke.
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