When her most recent stroke hit in June, Gerda Moneypenny was asleep at a Hillsborough assisted-living facility. By the time the staff found her, conscious but unresponsive, it was too late to give her clot-busting medication that can save lives and stave off paralysis.

So Bill Moneypenny, Gerda's son, was encouraged when doctors at UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill told him they might have another way to help.

With the family's OK, the UNC-CH doctors enlisted her in a clinical trial in which some patients receive high-intensity infrared energy from a device applied to their heads. The energy is thought to keep brain tissue alive while it's cut off from blood, oxygen and nutrients caused by a blockage from the stroke.

"It buys that portion of the brain that's not getting blood enough time for the body to break down the clot," said Dr. David Huang, a UNC Hospitals neurologist who is helping test the treatment. "It may buy the brain time to heal itself."

The device, called NeuroThera, is now being tested at UNC-CH, Duke University Medical Center and three other North Carolina hospitals as part of a national study paid for by its maker, a San Diego company called PhotoThera. That makes North Carolina, which has the fifth-highest death rate for strokes in the country, among the busiest recruiting grounds for the trial.

Infrared energy therapy offers the potential for a new treatment where there are now few options. The only drug approved as a treatment for stroke is tPA, or tissue plasminogen activator. It helps restore blood flow to the brain by breaking up clots, the culprits behind the vast majority of strokes. But it must be given within three hours of the onset of symptoms. At best, about 5 percent of stroke patients are treated.

"That leaves 95 percent of people with only our best supportive care and rehab," said Dr. Carmelo Graffagnino, a Duke University neurologist who is also participating in the NeuroThera trial. "We just wait for the body to break the clot up on its own, and many times that doesn't happen fast enough to prevent damage."

One advantage that NeuroThera offers is that it can be used to treat patients up to 24 hours after the onset of stroke symptoms.

"We could dramatically increase the treatment window," said Huang, associate director of UNC Hospitals' stroke center.

Energy is delivered through a hand-held probe about the size of a telephone receiver that is held to the scalp. Patients receive multiple bursts of energy through invisible light -- enough to treat the entire brain. A complete treatment takes about an hour.

Gerda Moneypenny, 78, and her family don't officially know that she got the infrared energy treatment, because half of patients in the study are randomly selected to get a "dummy" procedure in which the device isn't active. But nothing can convince them she was in the placebo group.

At 5 o'clock on the morning after her stroke, the left side of Gerda Moneypenny's body was almost completely paralyzed. She could barely speak. By that evening, just a few hours after participating in the study, she was speaking much more clearly and she could lift both her arms and legs up off the hospital bed.

"I couldn't have imagined how it could work so quick," Gerda Moneypenny said. "It was really like magic."

Bill Moneypenny, who lives in Chapel Hill, agrees. He's seen his mother, who has high blood pressure, fight her way back from at least four previous strokes. He has never seen her rebound so fast.

"In 14 hours, she was where she would normally have been six to 12 weeks after a stroke," Moneypenny said. "I would be astounded if she didn't get the treatment."

Doctors participating in the national study are no less excited by the treatment's potential.

An earlier study of 120 stroke patients found that 70 percent of patients treated with the NeuroThera device within 24 hours of their stroke improved, compared with 51 percent of patients who got sham treatments with the inactive device.

Improvement was defined as making a complete recovery within 90 days or achieving significant improvement as measured by a common index that doctors use. A patient with a totally paralyzed right arm and leg would have to regain full mobility to meet the study's criteria for improvement, for example. Treatment with the device has no known side effects.

If those results can be duplicated in the larger study, which seeks to enroll 660 patients, infrared energy therapy could change stroke treatment, said Graffagnino, the Duke neurologist.

"If, in fact, this is proven through this larger study, there should be nobody who isn't treated," said Graffagnino, who is director of Duke Hospital's neurointensive care unit. "Virtually everyone is in a hospital within 24 hours."

There is only one downside to the experimental treatment: Patients must have their heads shaved to get it. Hair absorbs some of the energy intended to treat brain tissue.

Gerda Moneypenny said going bald was no deterrent for her. After the treatment, her son bought her a UNC-CH ball cap, which she wears proudly over the fuzz that's grown back.

"This is my life," Moneypenny said. "Why shouldn't I part with my hair, which grows back?"

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