Cerebral amyloid angiopathy in Chinese: Incidence and significance

Abstract

Histological sections of 210 randomly selected autopsy brains and 49 consecutive autopsy cases of spontaneous intracerebral haemorrhage in the Chinese population aged over 40 years were examined by H and E and congo red stain with and without polarized light. In the randomly selected group, 10% of cases are positive for cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) while 8.2% of cases are positive in the group with haemorrhage. The incidence is strongly age-related. Compared with Western figures, Chinese are less frequently and less severely affected by CAA. Although CAA does account for some cases of spontaneous intracerebral haemorrhage, it cannot account for the high incidence of cerebral haemorrhage among Chinese. Its significance in Chinese is much lower than in Caucasians.