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Sir, We read the recent review on microbleeds in Alzheimer’s disease by Cordonnier and van der Flier (2011) with interest. We agree that determining the relevant contributions of cerebrovascular disease (related to conventional risk factors including hypertension) and cerebral amyloid angiopathy to microbleeds identified on T2*-weighted imaging is an important issue, which may lead to new insights into the pathology and pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease. One of the difficulties in attempting to delineate the relative contributions of conventional cerebrovascular and cerebral amyloid angiopathy pathology in sporadic Alzheimer’s disease is that multiple pathologies are common at more advanced ages. An alternative strategy is to study patients with autosomal dominantly inherited familial Alzheimer’s disease: such individuals can be diagnosed definitively during life and, having younger age at symptom onset …