Cerebral amyloid angiopathy and intracerebral haemorrhage: community-based cohort study, biobank, and record linkage

This research is about cerebral amyloid angiopathy, which is known as ‘CAA‘ for short. In CAA, a protein gradually damages blood vessels in the brain. CAA can be found in elderly people who are healthy, who have dementia, or who have stroke due to brain haemorrhage. This research aims to find out how CAA causes brain haemorrhages, how to recognise CAA in people with brain haemorrhage before they die, and what predicts whether someone who survives brain haemorrhage might have another one. The research will: (1) recruit adults with brain haemorrhage in one community, (2) obtain consent to collect information about them, their brain scans and their brain tissue, (3) compare them to people without brain haemorrhage in another MRC study, (4) compare different types of brain haemorrhage to eachother, and (5) study the outcome after different types of brain haemorrhage in one country. This research might benefit patients by finding out why brain haemorrhage happens, how to recognise its cause, and who is most likely to have it again. This could help identify ways of preventing brain haemorrhage in future, which will become more common as the population ages. Studying ageing is one of the MRC‘s two research priorities.