Clinical and Genetic Profiles in Chinese Patients with Huntington’s Disease: A Ten-year Multicenter Study in China

Huntington’s disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant inherited neurodegenerative disorder caused by CAG triplet repeats expansion in exon 1 of the Huntingtin gene (HTT). In China, HD is considered to have a low prevalence. The goal of this study was to describe the clinical characteristic and genetic profiles of HD in a Chinese cohort. A total of 322 individuals with expanded CAG repeats were consecutively recruited from the neurologic clinics of three medical centers in Southeastern China between 2008 and 2018. Among them, 80 were pre-symptomatic mutation carriers and 242 were symptomatic patients. The mean age at onset (AAO), defined here as the age at motor symptom onset, of the 242 manifest HD individuals was 40.3 ± 11.9 years and the mean CAG repeat length was 46.1 ± 7.5 in the group of symptomatic patients. Initial symptoms were abnormal movements in 88.8% of the patients with psychiatric symptoms in 6.2%, cognitive impairment in 3.3% and others in 1.7%. The AAO of motor was negatively correlated with the CAG repeat length in an exponential regression analysis (R 2 = 0.74, P<0.001). Analysis of 46 parent-child pairs showed that the CAG repeat length was longer in the offspring group (45.8 ±7.6) than in the parent group (43.8 ±3.0) (p=0.005). Overall, this study provides clinical and genetic profiles in a cohort of Chinese patients with HD, which should contribute to a better understanding of this disorder.