matthew_frosch@hms.harvard.edu

My research focuses on cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) -- a disease in which the peptide Aβ deposits in the walls of blood vessels and is associated with risk of hemorrhage ('lobar hemorrhages'). This peptide is the same material that forms the plaques of Alzheimer disease, and nearly all patients with Alzheimer disease have pathologic evidence of CAA as well. CAA also occurs in the absence of histologic evidence of Alzheimer disease, and can present with hemorrhages or with cognitive changes. We are interested the sequence of events is by which Aβ is deposited, what determines the distribution of involvement, how the deposits lead to vessel injury and hemorrhage and how the disease responds to therapeutic interventions under study for Alzheimer disease. We are pursuing these studies using in vivo kinetic measurements via multiphoton imaging in mouse models. These investigations are complemented by studies of human autopsy brain from individuals with CAA.