Case Report Clinical Report of a 17q12 Microdeletion with Additionally Unreported Clinical Features

Copyright © 2014 Jennifer L. Roberts et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Copy number variations involving the 17q12 region have been associated with developmental and speech delay, autism, aggression, self-injury, biting and hitting, oppositional defiance, inappropriate language, and auditory hallucinations. We present a tall-appearing 17-year-old boy with marfanoid habitus, hypermobile joints, mild scoliosis, pectus deformity, widely spaced nipples, pes cavus, autism spectrum disorder, intellectual disability, and psychiatric manifestations including physical and verbal aggression, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and oppositional defiance. An echocardiogram showed borderline increased aortic root size. An abdominal ultrasound revealed a small pancreas, mild splenomegaly with a 1.3 cm accessory splenule, and normal kidneys and liver. A testing panel for Marfan, aneurysm, and related disorders was negative. Subsequently, a 400K array-based comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) + SNP analysis was performed which identified a de novo suspected pathogenic deletion on chromosome 17q12 encompassing 28 genes. Despite the limited number of cases described in the literature with 17q12 rearrangements, our proband’s phenotypic features both overlap and expand on previously reported cases. Since syndrome-specific DNA sequencing studies failed to provide an explanation for this patient’s unusual habitus, we postulate that this case represents an expansion of th