Ring 21 chromosome: the mild end of the phenotypic spectrum.

The case is reported of a child with the karyotype 46, XY, r(21), who presented with linear growth retardation but who appears, at age 2 years 8 months, to be developing normally mentally. There is a small number of reports of mildly affected cases of r(21), and of some with an apparently completely normal phenotype. We presume a structural and functional cytogenetic heterogeneity underlies the observed phenotypic heterogeneity in the ring 21 spectrum.