ABSTRACT
Oculopharyngeal muscular dystrophy (OPMD) is an inherited neuromuscular disease associated with a short trinucleotide repeat expansion in Exon 1 of the PABPN1 gene. OPMD is uncommon in East Asian populations, and there have been no previous reports of Thai patients. We studied clinical and molecular genetic features of six unrelated Thai patients with autosomal dominant OPMD. All patients had expansions of the guanine-cytosine-guanine (GCG) repeat ranging from three to seven additional repeats in the PABPN1 gene. Haplotype analysis showed that these mutations might have originated independently. Analysis of the size of the GCG repeat in the PABPN1 gene in 200 Thai control patients showed that 0.5% of the control subjects possessed (GCG)(7), thereby suggesting that the prevalence of autosomal recessive OPMD in the Thai population was approximately 1 in 160,000. In conclusion, our data suggest that OPMD in Thailand may be more common than previously thought.
Subject(s)
Haplotypes , Muscular Dystrophy, Oculopharyngeal/genetics , Mutation , Poly(A)-Binding Protein II/genetics , Trinucleotide Repeat Expansion/genetics , Adult , Asian People/genetics , Female , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , ThailandABSTRACT
This brief case report describes an unusual presumed association of chronic HIV infection with multiple cerebral arteriovenous malformations. An adult male patient presented with recurrent spontaneous brain intracranial hemorrhages and neurologic deficits requiring surgical evacuation. The diagnosis was delayed because of lack of a high index of suspicion of this unexpected and previously unrecognized association.
