Delineating the pathogenic threshold and phenotypic spectrum of SCA27B: findings from a large French-Canadian cohort

Autosomal dominant spinocerebellar ataxia 27B (SCA27B), caused by an intronic (GAA•TTC) repeat expansion in FGF14, is a common cause of late-onset cerebellar ataxia, but its genotypic and phenotypic spectrum remains to be fully established.

We analysed the FGF14 (GAA•TTC) repeat expansion in a cohort of 134 patients with ataxia and 822 controls from Quebec. We conducted segregation study in large families to further characterize intergenerational repeat instability.

We found a significant enrichment of (GAA•TTC)_≥200 alleles in the ataxia cohort compared to controls (53.0%, 71/134, vs 3.6%, 30/822, p < 0.0001), including for (GAA•TTC)_200-249 alleles (8.2% vs 2.6%, p = 0.0026). We identified 12 ataxic patients with a phenotype compatible with SCA27B carrying a (GAA•TTC)_200-249 expansion supporting the pathogenicity of these alleles in some patients. We further delineated the phenotype of 125 symptomatic individuals from 69 families who carried an FGF14 (GAA•TTC)_≥200 repeat expansion. Patients with (GAA•TTC)_200-249, (GAA•TTC)_250-299, and (GAA•TTC)_≥300 had a similar phenotype. We observed that 14% of patients with episodic symptoms (13/92) had severe episodes that were initially misdiagnosed as stroke, vestibular neuritis, Wernicke's encephalopathy, or seizures.

This large cohort demonstrates that (GAA•TTC)_200-249 alleles are enriched in patients with ataxia compared to controls and can be pathogenic for SCA27B, supporting the need to define a lower pathogenic threshold in the presence of specific clinical criteria.