Background: Ambiguous or atypical phenotypes can make a definite diagnosis of primary immunodeficiency diseases based on biochemical indices alone challenging. Further, mortality in early life because of infections in patients with these conditions supports the use of genetic tests to facilitate rapid and accurate diagnoses.
Methods: Genetic and clinical analyses of three unrelated Chinese children with clinical manifestations of recurrent infections, who were considered to have primary immunodeficiency diseases, were conducted. Patient clinical features and serum immunological indices were recorded. Next-generation sequencing was used to screen for suspected pathogenic variants. Family co-segregation and in silico analysis were conducted to evaluate the pathogenicity of identified variants, following the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics guidance.
Results: All three patients were found to have predominant antibody defects. Sequencing analysis revealed that one had two compound heterozygous variants, c.255C>A and c.295C>T, in the autosomal gene, activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AICDA). The other two patients were each hemizygous for the variants c.1185G>A and c.82C>T in the Bruton's tyrosine kinase (BTK) gene on the X chromosome. In silico analysis revealed that identified substituted amino acids were highly conserved and predicted to cause structural and functional damage to the proteins.
Conclusion: Four pathogenic variants in AICDA and BTK were confirmed to cause different forms of hyper-IgM syndrome type 2 (HIGM2) and X-linked agammaglobulinemia (XLA); two were novel mutations that have never been reported previously. This is the first report of HIGM2 caused by AICDA deficiency in a patient from the Chinese mainland.
Keywords: X-linked agammaglobulinemia; hyper-IgM syndrome type 2; molecular diagnosis; next-generation sequencing; primary immunodeficiency diseases.
© 2020 The Authors. Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.