Q: If my family member has CAA, will I get it too?

A: Probably not.

There are some families (primarily from the Netherlands, Iceland, and Belgium) that inherit CAA in a dominant fashion, but most CAA patients do not have any affected family members. While other genes such as apolipoprotein E may slightly affect the risk for CAA, their association with the disease appears to be too weak to cause multiple cases to cluster in a family. Although there may be some increased genetic risk in relatives of CAA patients, we believe this risk to be small and rarely see two affected people in the same family.

*If you or your family members have concerns about neurologic symptoms that you are recognizing in multiple family members, we encourage you to seek out the opinion of your physician. *