The presence of diminished white matter and corpus callosal thinning in a case with a SOX9 mutation

SOX9 is responsible for campomelic dysplasia (CMPD). Symptoms of CMPD include recurrent apnea, upper respiratory infection, facial features, and shortening of the lower extremities. The variant acampomelic CMPD (ACMPD) lacks long bone curvature. A patient showed macrocephaly (+3.9 standard deviations [SD]) and minor anomalies, such as hypertelorism, palpebronasal fold, small mandible, and a cleft of soft palate without long bone curvature. From three months of age, he required tracheal intubation and artificial respiration under sedation because of tracheomalacia. Cranial magnetic resonance imaging was normal at one month of age but showed ventriculomegaly, hydrocephaly, and the corpus callosum thinning at two years of age. Exome sequencing revealed a de novo novel mutation, c. 236A>C, p (Q79P), in SOX9. Sox9 is thought to be crucial in neural stem cell development in the central and peripheral nervous system along with Sox8 and Sox10 in mice. In humans, neuronal abnormalities have been reported in cases of CMPD and ACMPD, including relative macrocephaly in 11 out of 22 and mild lateral ventriculomegaly in 2 out of 22 patients. We encountered a two-year old boy with ACMPD presenting with tracheomalacia and macrocephaly with a SOX9 mutation. We described for the first time an ACMPD patient with acquired diminished white matter and corpus callosal thinning, indicating the failure of oligodendrocyte/astrocyte development postnatally. This phenotype suggests that SOX9 plays a crucial role in human central nervous system development. Further cases are needed to clarify the relationship between human neural development and SOX9 mutations.