AP4S1 in fever-associated epilepsies and spastic paraplegia

Peds vs. adult. Sometimes it makes a fundamental difference in diagnosis whether a patient is seen in a pediatric setting or by an adult specialist later in life. Here is the most recent example from our consortium, which was just published in Human Molecular Genetics: what initially looked like recessive inheritance with intellectual disability and a peculiar fever-associated epilepsy syndrome eventually turned out to be the second reported family of the novel spastic paraplegia gene AP4S1. This raises the question of how much we are missing if we are looking at the wrong point in time. Let’s have a look at how genetics can help us see an overlap of diseases where we usually don’t have a chance to. Continue reading