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ARIA in Practice: Aligning Decisions Across the Care Pathway - Module 4 Preventing Acute Mismanagement Through Coordinated ARIA Escalation

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Description

This activity is supported by an independent education grant from Lilly. This online education program has been designed for healthcare professionals globally, excluding the United Kingdom.

Join Dr. Korilyn Zachrison for a practical, case-based session on evaluating patients receiving anti-amyloid Alzheimer’s disease therapy who present to the emergency department with acute neurological symptoms. Following a clinical stroke-mimic scenario, Dr. Zachrison demonstrates how to run time-critical stroke protocols in parallel with amyloid-related imaging abnormalities (ARIA) assessment—preventing contraindicated thrombolysis and strengthening handoffs across acute and longitudinal care teams.

Session Highlights

  • Parallel Stroke & ARIA Triage: Preserve rapid acute stroke evaluations while simultaneously screening for anti-amyloid exposure, prior ARIA history, and antithrombotic use.
  • Imaging & Thrombolysis Safety: Pair initial non-contrast CT with urgent MRI (or rapid transfer) to exclude ARIA before reperfusion decisions, recognizing ARIA as a contraindication to thrombolytics.
  • Structured Escalation & Handoffs: Prevent critical communication omissions during transfers using an ARIA-aware SBAR + closed-loop handoff framework and patient emergency alert cards.
  • Acute Pathway Integration: Embed triage medication prompts, EHR exposure alerts, specialist consult pathways, and explicit follow-up ownership directly into existing stroke workflows.

Who Should Watch

This program is designed for healthcare professionals involved in Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis, imaging, treatment, and acute evaluation.

Faculty

Kori S. Zachrison, MD, MSc, is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. An expert in optimizing systems for time-sensitive emergency care delivery, her academic and clinical focus centers heavily on telemedicine and stroke systems of care. Dr. Zachrison is continuously funded by major institutions including the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and the American Heart Association (AHA), and she co-leads a national stroke quality improvement initiative through the American College of Emergency Physicians Emergency Quality Network (E-QUAL). Her deep expertise in emergency medicine and stroke care delivery provides critical, cross-functional insights into this session’s focus on navigating emergency department triage and ensuring coordinated multidisciplinary escalation across the patient pathway.

Disclosures

Partners for Advancing Clinical Education (Partners) requires every individual in a position to control educational content to disclose all financial relationships with ineligible companies that have occurred within the past 24 months. Ineligible companies are organizations whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.

All relevant financial relationships for anyone with the ability to control the content of this educational activity are listed below and have been mitigated according to Partners policies. Others involved in the planning of this activity have no relevant financial relationships.

Kori S. Zachrison has no financial relationships to disclose.

Joint Accreditation Statement

In support of improving patient care, this activity has been planned and implemented by Partners for Advancing Clinical Education (Partners) and MedAll. Partners is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team.

Physician Continuing Education

Partners designates this enduring material for a maximum of 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Nursing Continuing Professional Development

The maximum number of hours awarded for this Nursing Continuing Professional Development activity is 0.25 ANCC contact hours.

PA Continuing Medical Education

Partners has been authorized by the American Academy of PAs (AAPA) to award AAPA Category 1 CME credit for activities planned in accordance with AAPA CME Criteria. This activity is designated for 0.25 AAPA Category 1 CME credits. PAs should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation.

Disclosure of Unlabeled Use

This educational activity may contain discussion of published and/or investigational uses of agents that are not indicated by the FDA. The planners of this activity do not recommend the use of any agent outside of the labeled indications. The opinions expressed in the educational activity are those of the faculty and do not necessarily represent the views of the planners. Please refer to the official prescribing information for each product for discussion of approved indications, contraindications, and warnings.

Disclaimer

Participants have an implied responsibility to use the newly acquired information to enhance patient outcomes and their own professional development. The information presented in this activity is not meant to serve as a guideline for patient management. Any procedures, medications, or other courses of diagnosis or treatment discussed or suggested in this activity should not be used by clinicians without evaluation of their patient’s conditions and possible contraindications and/or dangers in use, review of any applicable manufacturer’s product information, and comparison with recommendations of other authorities.

This continuing education activity is active starting November 13th 2026, and will expire on August 4th 2027.

Estimated time to complete this activity: 15 Minutes

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Computer generated transcript

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The following transcript was generated automatically from the content and has not been checked or corrected manually.

My name is Corey Zacherson. I am an emergency physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, uh, in the United States. So we'll move on to the 4th section, which is preventing acute mismanagement through coordinated AIA escalation. And so coming back to our patient, Margaret, I will recall she's a 73 year old woman who's receiving anti-amyloid therapy for early Alzheimer's disease. And now, Margaret is experiencing sudden confusion, expressive dysphagia, and a right arm tremor. And she presents to an emergency department, but unfortunately, at the emergency department where she goes, it's not connected with her um treatment center, and so her anti-amyloid therapy and prior ARIA um status are not known or visible in that emergency department's record. And so as she presents to that ED, the differential uh by the treating uh team is clearly going to include ischemic stroke and intracranial hemorrhage, seizure, other emergency, stroke mimics. Also, it should include symptomatic aria. And so, how do we make sure that our systems are set up in a way that when Margaret presents, Aria is on our differential and on our treatment, um, uh, evaluation and treatment pathway. So, for our first poll, uh, in this section, the, um, we have Margaret with these uh symptoms and the stroke assessment in the emergency department has begun, and fortunately, the team has known to ask the right questions. Her anti-amyloid exposure is identified. And so now in this setting, what should they do first? A pause their stroke assessment, await a routine MRI and specialist review before continuing. B, continue the stroke assessment, give thrombolysis as soon as the CT excludes hemorrhage. C, continue the stroke assessment, verify the exposure and obtain urgent specialist review. D, diagnose RA clinically, contact the memory clinic before emergency imaging, or E, transfer to the treating center before local stabilization and initial imaging. So, in this case, the right answer is C. To continue the stroke assessment, verify the exposure, and obtain urgent specialist review. And really, this is uh uh taking a lot of our approach in emergency medicine and the emergency department. We're parallel processing. We're thinking about a patient's differential and um evaluating multiple things on that differential diagnosis, even as we're sort of considering Um, the different possibilities of our treatment path. And so we want to both, uh, preserve the time critical stroke assessment, while also making the treatment exposure for prior aria, uh, something that we're, um, knowing about, thinking about, and including in the way that we're approaching our patient. And so how do we do that? Uh, we want to run these things in parallel. So our time critical acute assessment is not going to change. We're going to stabilize our patient, define the onset and the trajectory of symptoms, also, uh, be activating our appropriate stroke pathway. On that stroke pathway, we're obtaining initial emergency imaging without delay. Typically, stroke protocols include a a first pass with a non-contrast head CT and that should still be the case here. And um as we're doing that, we're keeping stroke, intracranial hemorrhage, seizure, um, and AIA in our differential. And so as we're doing that time critical acute assessment, we're simultaneously thinking about um identifying risk for AIA and our evaluation there. So we're looking at when the patient um began anti-amyloid therapy, what is their treatment duration, what medication are they on, when did they have their last administration? We're looking at their AIA history. What did their baseline MRI look like? What did their most recent MRI look like? Um, and when was that last imaging, uh, completed? We're looking at their anticoagulant and antiplatelet exposure, and we're including the specialists in this, um, evaluation as well. This is just a reminder that symptoms alone do not identify a cause or etiology of the symptoms, focal deficits, confusion, visual changes, seizures, headaches, aphasia. These can occur in aria, these can occur in stroke, in ICH, in seizure, in migraine, and, you know, and, and so the, the differential of um Of these acute changes in neurologic status for patients is much broader than just stroke, much broader than just RA. We're thinking about all of these things. Um, and our differential, um, we're going to work through as we're thinking about the exposure, we're thinking about the time course, and we're moving toward imaging for patients and engaging our experts in, um, our treatment. Medication history as uh we've seen on the previous slides, um, just to reiterate here, this is a really a time-critical diagnostic input. So knowing the patient's um medication that they're on, what is the route, uh, when was the last administration, what is their AA history, um, what is their anti-thrombotic history, and engaging the full team in our, um, evaluation and management decisions. And as we're doing this acute evaluation, we're thinking about imaging in a couple of ways. So, CT and MRI are both important, um, and they're looking at and answering different questions for us. So, our stroke protocol, um, typically starts with a CT. With a non-contrast CT we're looking for intracranial hemorrhage, um, sometimes we're picking up a large vessel occlusion or other acute findings. This is part of our local stroke pathways. Generally at baseline. Um, and we're not changing that. We're sort of continuing on that path. But at the same time, when we have a patient on anti-amyloid therapy in the emergency department with acute neurologic findings, we want to be thinking about how are we evaluating for ARIA and how are we, um, either identifying it or eliminating it from our differential so that we can move on to appropriate treatment decisions for the patient. And so to do that, we really need the MRI. Uh, what is the MRI doing? It's looking for edema and so Focal effusion, hemorrhagic findings, it's really giving us more information about this full differential that we're looking at and ideally we're using that in comparison with baseline and prior MRIs for these patients on anti-amyloid therapy so that we can evaluate sort of the trajectory. Um, and so when MRI is not available and we have a patient with Um, acute neurologic findings on anti-amyloid therapy in an emergency department. One of the things we need to be thinking about is how we're going to get that MRI. Because the reperfusion and antithrombotic decisions that we're going to be making about this patient also really need specialist input. They need, um, both all of the information that we can get from the imaging, and they need the specialists to be coming together and thinking about these decisions with us. Um, we want to sort of Know our exposure, know our um imaging findings, know whether there's an occlusion and be thinking about what guidance we have for these treatment decisions. In particular, you know, sort of the um the elephant of the room of thrombolysis in A is one that uh deserves some um explicit attention in um in this presentation. And so, You know, we have case reports of patients who've been on anti-amyloid therapy, who've presented with acute neurologic findings to an emergency department, and who've um had RAM misdiagnosed as an acute stroke and had uh thrombolytics administered with devastating consequences. And so, um, this has really been an important lesson and is um something that's informed uh some of the ways that we're thinking about our acute evaluation and our um Our approaches in the emergency care delivery for these patients. The FDA has issued guidance on this in the US. The American Heart Association has also put out a scientific advisory that summarizes the limited evidence and in the 2026 acute ischemic stroke guidelines put out by the American Heart Association. Anti-amyloid therapy and AIA are explicitly listed as contraindications to thrombolytic treatment. And this is all based on sort of our limited experience so far. There's very little um evidence to date, um, certainly not robust evidence to inform our understanding of how patients with anti-amyloid therapy should be considered for thrombolytic, but the thing that we do know is that when RA is identified, thrombolytics are contraindicated. Of course, thrombolytics um are not the same as anticoagulation or antiplatelet therapy. And so, um, thinking about all of those treatment decisions are really going to be, um, places where understanding the indi indication and the bleeding context and the, um, the approach, it will be taken together and should be done in coordination with the patients, um, Treatment team. OK, so for our next poll, the question is, what if Aria and stroke both remain possible? So, coming back to our case with Margaret in um our scenario, she's had her CT, it's excluded intracranial hemorrhage, but she's still aphasic in the.