Reply: Atherosclerosis and vascular cognitive impairment neuropathological guideline

Sir,Our aim in developing the vascular cognitive impairment neuropathological guidelines (VCING) was to establish criteria that we could show to be highly reproducible between neuropathologists in different centres, for post-mortem assessment of the likelihood that cognitive impairment was attributable to cerebrovascular pathology. To ensure reproducibility, we performed blinded post-mortem assessment of sections of brain tissue that were circulated to nine neuropathologists in centres across the UK. The advantage of this approach was that it enabled us to develop a protocol that can easily and reliably be applied in centres other than those participating in the VCING project. However, as noted by Oveisgharan and Hachinski (2016), our approach did impose certain practical constraints on the scope …