Short Communications Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy Presenting as a Mass Lesion

PRIMARY cerebral amyloidosis is characterized by deposition of amyloid within the cerebral tissue (e.g., core of neuritic plaques and core of plaques in spongiform encephalopathies) and the cerebral and meningeal blood vessel walls (amyloid or congophilic angiopathy) in the absence of systemic amyloidosis. Primary cerebral amyloidosis has been associated with normal brain aging changes" and with multiple neurological disturbances including dementia of the Alzheimer's type, cerebral infarction,*arteriovenous malformations, radiation necrosis, progressive demyelinating syndrome, chronic vasculitis, dementia pugilistica, hereditary ataxia, hereditary cerebral hemorrhage, and spontaneous cerebral hemorrhage in the elderly normotensive patient."We recently treated a patient with primary cerebral amyloidosis that presented with the clinical picture of an intracerebral mass lesion not related to a hemorrhage. This is a most unusual clinical presentation of primary cerebral amyloidosis, which may be relevant to the proposed etiologies of this disease.