Stefan Toegel

The genetic landscape of axonal neuropathies in the middle-aged and elderly

Publisher: Ovid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health)

Date: 03-11-2020

DOI: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000011132

Abstract: To test the hypothesis that monogenic neuropathies such as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT) contribute to frequent but often unexplained neuropathies in the elderly, we performed genetic analysis of 230 patients with unexplained axonal neuropathies and disease onset ≥35 years. We recruited patients, collected clinical data, and conducted whole-exome sequencing (WES n = 126) and MME single-gene sequencing (n = 104). We further queried WES repositories for MME variants and measured blood levels of the MME -encoded protein neprilysin. In the WES cohort, the overall detection rate for assumed disease-causing variants in genes for CMT or other conditions associated with neuropathies was 18.3% (familial cases 26.4%, apparently sporadic cases 12.3%). MME was most frequently involved and accounted for 34.8% of genetically solved cases. The relevance of MME for late-onset neuropathies was further supported by detection of a comparable proportion of cases in an independent patient s le, preponderance of MME variants among patients compared to population frequencies, retrieval of additional late-onset neuropathy patients with MME variants from WES repositories, and low neprilysin levels in patients' blood s les. Transmission of MME variants was often consistent with an incompletely penetrant autosomal-dominant trait and less frequently with autosomal-recessive inheritance. A detectable fraction of unexplained late-onset axonal neuropathies is genetically determined, by variants in either CMT genes or genes involved in other conditions that affect the peripheral nerves and can mimic a CMT phenotype. MME variants can act as completely penetrant recessive alleles but also confer dominantly inherited susceptibility to axonal neuropathies in an aging population.

Medical University Of Vienna

Location: Austria

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University Of Veterinary Medicine Vienna

Location: Austria

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University Of Applied Sciences

Location: Austria

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Hospital For Special Surgery

Location: United States of America

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Università Degli Studi Di Perugia Dipartimento Di Scienze Farmaceutiche

Location: Italy

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University Of Vienna

Location: Austria

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EMBL Heidelberg Genome Biology

Location: Germany

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