Abstract
PTEN Hamartoma Tumour Syndrome (PHTS) includes Cowden syndrome (CS), Bannayan-Riley-Ruvalcaba syndrome (BRRS), and other conditions resulting from germline mutation of the PTEN tumour suppressor gene. Although macrocephaly, presumably due to megencephaly, is found in both CS and BRRS, the prevalence and degree have not been formally assessed in PHTS. We evaluated head size in a prospective nested series of 181 patients found to have pathogenic germline PTEN mutations. Clinical data including occipital-frontal circumference (OFC) measurement were requested for all participants. Macrocephaly was present in 94% of 161 evaluable PHTS individuals. In patients ≤18 years, mean OFC was +4.89 standard deviations (SD) above the population mean with no difference between genders (P=0.7). Among patients >18 years, average OFC was 60.0 cm in females and 62.8 cm in males (P<0.0001). To systematically determine whether macrocephaly was due to megencephaly, we examined PtenM3M4 missense mutant mice generated and maintained on mixed backgrounds. Mice were killed at various ages, brains were dissected out and weighed. Average brain weight for PtenM3M4 homozygous mice (N=15) was 1.02 g compared with 0.57 g for heterozygous mice (N=29) and 0.49 g for wild-type littermates (N=24) (P<0.0001). Macrocephaly, secondary to megencephaly, is an important component of PHTS and more prevalent than previously appreciated. Patients with PHTS have increased risks for breast and thyroid cancers, and early diagnosis is key to initiating timely screening to reduce patient morbidity and mortality. Clinicians should consider germline PTEN testing at an early point in the diagnostic work-up for patients with extreme macrocephaly.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to our patients and their families who have taken part in our research over the last many years. We wish to acknowledge all the genetic counselors, physicians, and other healthcare providers who have referred patients to our study. This study is funded, in part, by the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD (R01CA118980 and P01CA124570 to CE) and the William Randolph Hearst Foundations, New York (to CE). AKT is a predoctoral fellow of the HHMI Program in Molecular Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine. CE is the Sondra J and Stephen R Hardis Chair of Cancer Genomic Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, and an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor, generously funded, in part by the FM Kirby Foundation.
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Mester, J., Tilot, A., Rybicki, L. et al. Analysis of prevalence and degree of macrocephaly in patients with germline PTEN mutations and of brain weight in Pten knock-in murine model. Eur J Hum Genet 19, 763–768 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2011.20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2011.20
