Бюллетень сибирской медицины (Jan 2021)

Atypical course of Parkinson’s disease with clinical manifestations of Huntington’s disease in a patient with an allele of 27 CAG repeats in the HTT gene

  • M. A. Nikitina,
  • E. Yu. Bragina,
  • M. S. Nazarenko,
  • N. G. Zhukova,
  • D. E. Gomboeva,
  • K. F. Nurzhanova,
  • N. V. Tsentr,
  • V. M. Alifirova

DOI
https://doi.org/10.20538/1682-0363-2020-4-235-240
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 19, no. 4
pp. 235 – 240

Abstract

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Huntington’s disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant progressive neurodegenerative disease. Its molecular cause is a cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG) trinucleotide repeat dynamic expansion in the huntingtin (HTT) gene. Alleles with 36–39 CAG-repeats are incompletely penetrant, as individuals might develop symptoms but typically with a later age of onset. When repeats are equal or greater than 40, the symptoms of the disease occur. It is considered that CAG-repeats in the “intermediate” alleles (27–35 repeats) also cause the symptoms of the HD.We present here the case of a patient who has clinical phenotype and family history of Parkinson’s disease (PD), but 27 CAG-repeats. The feature of this patient is early development of non-motor manifestations such as cognitive impairment, psychotic disorders, early dystonia in a hand, camptocormia and poor response to levodopa. It is believed that the intermediate allele of HTT gene might modify the clinical phenotype of PD in this patient.

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