Neurovascular Disease and Comprehensive Stroke Center

The UCSF Neurovascular Disease and Comprehensive Stroke Center provides expert care to patients with cerebrovascular disease, or conditions involving the brain and its blood vessels. We treat patients both in the hospital and in our outpatient clinic.

Our inpatient service delivers emergency care to hospitalized patients with acute ischemic stroke, subarachnoid hemorrhage and intracerebral hemorrhage of any cause, and is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Patients may be transferred from other hospitals or admitted through the UCSF Emergency Department. After discharge, patients receive follow-up care in our outpatient stroke clinic or the Neurorecovery Clinic, or both.

Our outpatient clinic offers consultations for patients with an established or suspected cerebrovascular condition, such as ischemic stroke, brain aneurysm, intracerebral hemorrhage and vascular malformation. Patients receive an accurate diagnosis and treatment recommendations to prevent future strokes. Recommendations may include surgical procedures, medications and lifestyle changes. We also provide specialized care for pulsatile tinnitus from an expert team of specialists from relevant disciplines.

Interested patients may have access to experimental therapies by joining a clinical trial. Patients who've had strokes, for example, may be eligible to join the UCSF Stroke Recovery Initiative, a research program focused on improving the healing process after stroke.

Our team is proud of the recognition we've received for providing exceptional care. We're the first center in San Francisco to be designated a comprehensive stroke center by the Joint Commission, an independent national accreditation organization for health care institutions. In addition, two advocacy organizations, the Angioma Alliance and Cure HTT, have named UCSF a center of excellence for treating vascular abnormalities.

Our quality outcomes

We are dedicated to continually raising the bar on what exceptional neurovascular care means for our patients, and we work to ensure that outcomes for our patients reflect that. For example, we've maintained a stroke or mortality complication rate after an elective diagnostic angiogram of 0 percent in 2018 and 2019, our overall rate of elective aneurysm clipping and coiling complications remained 2 percent or lower, and we reported a complication rate for carotid revascularization procedures of 0 percent for both asymptomatic and symptomatic carotid stenosis in 2019.

Our center is part of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences.