A b s t r a c t
Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy (EDMD), a rare inherited disease, is characterized clinically by humero-peroneal muscle atrophy and weakness, multijoint contractures, spine rigidity and cardiac insufficiency with conduction defects. There are at least six types of EDMD known so far, of which five have been associated with mutations in genes encoding nuclear proteins. The majority of the EDMD cases described so far are of the emerinopathy (EDMD1) kind, with a recessive X-linked mode of inheritance, or else laminopathy (EDMD2), with an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance. In the work described here, the authors have sought to describe the history by which EDMD came to be distinguished as a separate entity, as well as the clinical and genetic characteristics of the disease, the pathophysiology of lamin-related muscular diseases and, finally, therapeutic issues, prevention and ethical aspects.
ObjectiveTo test the hypothesis that monogenic neuropathies such as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT) contribute to frequent but often unexplained neuropathies in the elderly, we performed genetic analysis of 230 patients with unexplained axonal neuropathies and disease onset ≥35 years.MethodsWe recruited patients, collected clinical data and conducted whole-exome sequencing (WES, n = 126) and MME single-gene sequencing (n = 104). We further queried WES repositories for MME variants and measured blood levels of the MME-encoded protein neprilysin.ResultsIn the WES cohort, the overall detection rate for assumed disease-causing variants in genes for CMT or other conditions associated with neuropathies was 18.3% (familial cases 26.4%, apparently sporadic cases 12.3%). MME was most frequently involved and accounted for 34.8% of genetically solved cases. The relevance of MME for late-onset neuropathies was further supported by detection of a comparable proportion of cases in an independent patient sample, preponderance of MME variants among patients compared to population frequencies, retrieval of additional late-onset neuropathy patients with MME variants from WES repositories, and low neprilysin levels in patients' blood samples. Transmission of MME variants was often consistent with an incompletely penetrant autosomal dominant trait and less frequently with autosomal recessive inheritance.ConclusionsA detectable fraction of unexplained late-onset axonal neuropathies is genetically determined, either by variants in CMT genes or genes involved in other conditions that affect the peripheral nerves and can mimic a CMT phenotype. MME variants can act as completely penetrant recessive alleles but also confer dominantly inherited susceptibility to axonal neuropathies in an aging population.
Defects in castings often appear unexpectedly and it is di cult to identify their source as they can be brought about by a large number of randomly changing production parameters. Arti®cial neural networks were used for detection of the causes of gas porosity defects in steel castings. The applied procedure included systematic storing of two types of information: about the process parameters, materials used and even employees involved in the production (as the network inputs) and about the appearance of a given defect (as the network output). The trained network was able to detect interdependences among various factors in¯uencing water vapour pressure in the mould and thus to indicate the most probable cause of porosity.
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