Pathogenic Huntingtin Repeat Expansions in Patients with Frontotemporal Dementia and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Abstract

To examine the role of repeat expansions in the pathogenesis of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), we performed repeat sizing of ten genetic loci previously implicated in neurodegenerative diseases. We examined whole-genome sequence data from 2,442 FTD/ALS patients, 2,599 Lewy body dementia (LBD) patients, and 3,158 neurologically healthy subjects. Pathogenic expansions (range: 40 to 64 CAG repeats) in the huntingtin (HTT) gene were found in three (0.12%) patients diagnosed with pure FTD/ALS syndromes but were not present in the LBD or healthy cohorts. We replicated our findings in an independent cohort, and identified five (0.14%) out of 3,674 FTD/ALS patients harboring pathogenic HTT CAG expansions. Postmortem evaluations of two patients revealed huntingtin-positive, as well as TDP43- and ubiquitin-positive aggregates, predominantly in the frontal cortex, without neostriatal atrophy. Our findings reveal an etiological relationship between HTT repeat expansions and FTD/ALS syndromes, and indicate that genetic screening of FTD/ALS patients for HTT repeat expansions should be considered.