Genetic investigations on chronic forms of infantile and juvenile spinal muscular atrophy

A material of 247 cases selected from 260 cases of spinal muscular atrophy in the Warsaw Department of Neurology in 1960-1974 was analyzed. The size of sibships was established and calculations were made of the mean distribution of the age at onset, also according to sex, for the different clinical forms, genetical proportions by the method of siblings and of probands, and coefficient of sib-sib correlation for the material as a whole and separately for males, females and male-female pairs. The analysis shows the course of the disease to differ between the sexes and to be mild in males more often than in females, as is particularly noticeable in the higher age groups. Cases of Kugelberg-Welander's disease are predominantly male. The hypothesis is advanced that a proportion of male patients have a sex-linked modifying gene of a fairly high frequency (possibly of the range of 1 in 5 males, and 1 in 25, in the homozygous state, in females). Although it would not disprove conclusively the nosological distinctness of different forms of infantile and juvenile spinal muscular atrophy, the existence of the modifying gene, if proved, would tend rather to add to the likelihood of their constituting a single recessive autosomal disease.