Hearing loss is the most common communication disorder affecting about 1-7/1000 births worldwide. The most affected areas are developing countries due to extensively poor health care systems. Environmental causes contribute to 50-70% of cases, specifically meningitis in sub-Saharan Africa. The other 30-50% is attributed to genetic factors. Nonsyndromic hearing loss is the most common form of he...

Autosomal recessive non-syndromic hearing loss (ARNSHL) is a highly heterogeneous genetic condition. PDZD7 has emerged as a new genetic etiology of ARNSHL. Biallelic mutations in the PDZD7 gene have been reported in two German families, four Iranian families, and a Pakistani family with ARNSHL. The effect of PDZD7 on ARNSHL in other population has yet to be elucidated. Two Chinese ARNSHL famili...

BACKGROUND Hearing loss (HL) is the most frequent sensory birth defect in humans. Autosomal recessive non-syndromic HL (ARNSHL) is the most common type of hereditary HL. It is extremely heterogeneous and over 70 loci (known as DFNB) have been identified. This study was launched to determine the relative contribution of more frequent loci in a cohort of ARNSHL families. METHODS Thirty-seven Ir...

BACKGROUND Autosomal recessive non-syndromic hearing loss (ARNSHL) is the most common hereditary form of deafness, and exhibits a great deal of genetic heterogeneity. So far, more than seventy various DFNB loci have been mapped for ARNSHL by linkage analysis. The contribution of three common DFNB loci including DFNB3, DFNB9, DFNB21 and gap junction beta-2 (GJB2) gene mutations in ARNSHL was inv...

Autosomal recessive non-syndromic hearing loss (ARNSHL) is defined as a genetically heterogeneous disorder. The aim of the present study was to screen for pathogenic variants in an Iranian pedigree with ARNSHL. Next-generation targeted sequencing of 127 deafness genes in the proband detected two novel variants, a homozygous missense variant in PTPRQ (c.2599 T>C, p.Ser867Pro and a heterozygous m...

Hearing loss is the most common form of sensory impairment in humans and is frequently progressive in nature. Here we link a previously uncharacterized gene to hearing impairment in mice and humans. We show that hearing loss in the ethylnitrosourea (ENU)-induced samba mouse line is caused by a mutation in Loxhd1. LOXHD1 consists entirely of PLAT (polycystin/lipoxygenase/alpha-toxin) domains and...

Identification of the pathogenic mutations underlying autosomal recessive nonsyndromic hearing loss (ARNSHL) is difficult, since causative mutations in 39 different genes have so far been reported. After excluding mutations in the most common ARNSHL gene, GJB2, via Sanger sequencing, we performed whole-exome sequencing (WES) in 30 individuals from 20 unrelated multiplex consanguineous families ...

Autosomal recessive nonsyndromic hearing loss (ARNSHL) is a genetically heterogeneous sensorineural disorder, generally manifested with prelingual hearing loss and absence of other clinical manifestations. The aim of this study is to identify the pathogenic gene in a four-generation consanguineous Chinese family with ARNSHL. A novel homozygous variant, c.9316dupC (p.H3106Pfs*2), in the myoxin X...

Hearing loss (HL) is the most common inherited sensory disorder affecting about 1 in 1000 births. The first locus for nonsyndromic autosomal recessive HL is on chromosome 13q11–22. The two genes, GJB2 and GJB6, are closely located on chromosome and are known to be co-expressed in the embryonic cochlea. Deletion mutations involving GJB6 were associated with autosomal-recessive nonsyndromic heari...

The frequency of inherited bilateral autosomal recessive non-syndromic hearing loss (ARNSHL) in Pakistan is 1.6/1000 individuals. More than 50% of the families carry mutations in GJB2 while mutations in MYO15A account for about 5% of recessive deafness. In the present study a cohort of 30 ARNSHL families was initially screened for mutations in GJB2 and MYO15A. Homozygosity mapping was performed...