Sporadic cerebral amyloid angiopathy is a common small vessel disease that preferentially involves small cortical and leptomeningeal arteries due to progressive amyloid-β deposition in their walls. Cerebral amyloid angiopathy occurs frequently in elderly people, and is a common and important cause of symptomatic lobar intracerebral haemorrhage and cognitive impairment. There is currently a growing interest in cerebral amyloid angiopathy, at least partly thanks neuroimaging, which now allows an unprecedented ability to investigate the disease dynamics in vivo using MRI to reveal complex patterns of cerebral bleeding and ischaemia. The detection of CAA during life is becoming an increasingly important challenge, since approaches of prevention or treatment (disease-modification) are now emerging as realistic possibilities. Determining the most promising treatments requires development of reliable biomarkers, the goal of my research. The main objective of this PhD thesis is to provide new insights into potential clinical and applied clinical neuroimaging biomarkers in patients with cerebral amyloid angiopathy. This is accomplished by a portfolio of research studies investigating: (a) the clinical and radiological spectrum of transient focal neurological episodes as a potential clinical clue for cerebral amyloid angiopathy; (b) cortical superficial siderosis, a distinct pattern on bleeding in the brain, as both a diagnostic and a prognostic marker of cerebral amyloid angiopathy; (c) MRI-visible perivascular spaces topography, as a new marker of small vessel disease and cerebral amyloid angiopathy; (d) potential pathological, neuroimaging and genetic differences in patients with pathology-proven CAA with and without intracerebral haemorrhage and presents evidence for different disease phenotypes; (e) the evidence whether the presence and burden of cerebral microbleeds on MRI scans is associated with an increased risk of recurrent spontaneous ICH, and if this risk is different according to MRI-defined microangiopathy subtype, in a meta-analysis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:639671 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Charidimou, A. |
| Publisher | University College London (University of London) |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1461023/ |
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