Clinical features and genetic analysis of a child with EAST/SeSAME syndrome

Abstract

To explore the genetic basis for a EAST/SeSAME syndrome child featuring epilepsy, ataxia, sensorineural deafness and intellectual disability. A child with EAST/SeSAME syndrome who had presented at the Third Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University in January 2021 was selected as the study object. Peripheral blood samples of the child and her parents were collected and subjected to whole exome sequencing. Candidate variants were verified by Sanger sequencing. Genetic testing revealed that the child has harbored compound heterozygous variants of the KCNJ10 gene, namely c.557T>C (p.Val186Ala) and c.386T>A (p.Ile129Asn), which were inherited from her mother and father, respectively. Based on the guidelines from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG), both variants were predicted as likely pathogenic (PM1+PM2_Supporting+PP3+PP4; PM1+PM2_Supporting+PM3+PP3+PP4). The patient was diagnosed with EAST/SeSAME syndrome due to the compound heterozygous variants of the KCNJ10 gene.