Tiny vacuum cleaners could become conventional tools for unclogging the arteries of heart attack and stroke patients.

In a study of 125 patients with stroke symptoms, a suctioning device called the Penumbra Stroke System reopened 82 percent of the blocked blood vessels to normal or near-normal blood flow, and nearly 42 percent of the patients showed significant recovery 30 days later.

Most strokes are ischemic, caused by a blockage in vessels that carry oxygen-rich blood to the brain. The Penumbra system, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December, is threaded through the artery via catheter and is able to suck out abnormally shaped or rigid clots that can’t be removed by other devices. And unlike traditional clot-dissolving medications that are only effective if administered within three hours after symptoms begin, Penumbra works for up to eight hours; it also is more effective on clots too large for clot-dissolving drugs.

The Penumbra study did not compare the system with other treatments, so more research is needed, according to the American Stroke Association. Findings were presented at the ASA’s International Stroke Conference in February.

Another study found that mini-vacuums can help people survive major heart attacks, too. Researchers at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands treated 1,071 patients who had major heart attacks in 2005 or 2006 and were treated with either traditional balloon angioplasty or with the new suctioning procedure. Heart attack was stopped completely in 57 percent of patients who were suctioned compared with 44 percent of patients who had angioplasty.

A heart attack is caused by plaque that breaks off in the coronary artery and forms a clot that blocks blood and oxygen flow to the heart. The conventional treatment is to open the vessel by threading a wire through it to push the clot aside with a small balloon. But sometimes pieces of plaque break off in this procedure, raising the risk of clots forming elsewhere in the artery, says Tone Svilaas, M.D., the principal investigator. The new suctioning method—known officially as a “thrombus aspiration catheter”—can minimize this complication.

“At our center, now we only use this new therapy,” Svilaas says

The study, led by Felix Zijlstra, M.D., was published Feb. 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine.