Background
The diagnostic yield of whole-exome sequencing (WES) varies from 30%–50% among patients with mild to severe neurodevelopmental delay (NDD)/intellectual disability (ID). Routine retrospective reanalysis of undiagnosed patients has increased the total diagnostic yield by 10–15%. Here, we performed proband-only WES of 1065 patients with NDD/ID and applied a prospective, daily reanalysis automated pipeline to patients without clinically significant variants to facilitate diagnoses.
Methods
The study included 1065 consecutive patients from 1056 nonconsanguineous unrelated families from 10 multimedical centers in South Korea between April 2018 and August 2021. WES data were analyzed daily using automatically updated databases with variant classification and symptom similarity scoring systems.
Results
At the initial analysis, 402 patients from 1056 unrelated families (38.0%, 402/1,056 families) had a positive genetic diagnosis. Daily prospective, automated reanalysis resulted in the identification of 34 additional diagnostic variants in 31 patients (3%), which increased our molecular diagnostic yield to 41% (433/1056 families). Among these 31 patients, 26 were diagnosed with 23 different diseases that were newly discovered after 2019. The time interval between the first analysis and the molecular diagnosis by reanalysis was 1.2 ± 0.9 years, which was shorter in the patients enrolled during the latter part of the study period.
Conclusion
Daily updated databases and reanalysis systems enhance the diagnostic performance in patients with NDD/ID, contributing to the rapid diagnosis of undiagnosed patients by applying the latest molecular genetic information.
X-linked Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMTX1) is a clinically heterogeneous hereditary motor and sensory neuropathy with X-linked transmission. Common clinical manifestations of CMTX1 disease, as in other forms of Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, are distal muscle wasting and weakness, hyporeflexia, distal sensory disturbance, and foot deformities. Mutations in the connexin-32 gene (gap junction protein β1 [GJB1]) are responsible for CMTX1 disease. In this report, we describe a patient with CMTX1 disease presenting with recurrent attacks of transient and episodic acute demyelinating encephalomyelitis (ADEM)–like symptoms without previous signs of lower extremity weakness or foot deformities; the patient, as well as his asymptomatic mother, exhibited a novel GJB1 mutation (p.Met1Ile). Differential diagnosis of recurrent and transient ADEM-like illness, if unexplained, should include the possibility of CMTX1 disease.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.