Here, we report a consanguineous family harboring a novel homozygous frame-shift mutation in ASPM leading to a truncation of the ASPM protein after amino acid position 1830. The phenotype of the patients was associated with microcephaly, epilepsy, and behavioral and cognitive deficits. Despite the obvious genetic similarity, the affected patients show a considerable phenotypic heterogeneity regarding the degree of mental retardation, presence of epilepsy and MRI findings. Interestingly, the degree of mental retardation and the presence of epilepsy correlates well with the severity of abnormalities detected in brain MRI. On the other hand, we detected no evidence for substantial nonsense-mediated ASPM transcript decay in blood samples. This indicates that other factors than ASPM expression levels are relevant for the variability of structural changes in brain morphology seen in patients with primary hereditary microcephaly caused by ASPM mutations.
Keywords: ASPM mutation; behavioral and cognitive deficits; epilepsy; primary hereditary microcephaly.