An animal model of vascular amyloidosis.

The article presents information on hereditary cerebral hemorrhage with amyloidosis-Dutch type (HCHWA-D). HCHWA-D, a genetic disorder first identified in four large families from the Netherlands, strikes individuals as young as 40 years old and causes blood vessels in the brain to hemorrhage. About half of affected individuals die, and patients who survive these recurrent strokes develop cognitive impairment and dementia a few years later. The HCHWA-D disease is associated with the gene, located on chromosome 21, that codes for the Aβ precursor protein (APP) where a single mutation, the first ever reported in the human APP gene, replaces a guanine with a cytosine at codon 693.