Influences of sex chromosome aneuploidy on height, weight, and body mass index in human childhood and adolescence.

Abstract

Sex chromosome aneuploidies (SCAs) are collectively common conditions caused by carriage of a sex chromosome dosage other than XX for females and XY for males. Increases in sex chromosome dosage (SCD) have been shown to have an inverted-U association with height, but we lack combined studies of SCA effects on height and weight, and it is not known if any such effects vary with age. Here, we study norm-derived height and weight z-scores in 177 youth spanning 8 SCA karyotypes (XXX, XXY, XYY, XXXX, XXXY, XXYY, XXXXX, and XXXXY). We replicate a previously described inverted-U association between mounting SCD and height, and further show that there is also a muted version of this effect for weight: both phenotypes are elevated until SCD reaches 4 for females and 5 for males but decrease thereafter. We next use 266 longitudinal measures available from a subset of karyotypes (XXX, XXY, XYY, and XXYY) to show that mean height in these SCAs diverges further from norms with increasing age. As weight does not diverge from norms with increasing age, BMI decreases with increasing age. These findings extend our understanding of growth as an important clinical outcome in SCA, and as a key context for known effects of SCA on diverse organ systems that scale with body size.