Congenital accessory mitral valve tissue anomaly in a patient with genetically confirmed hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

Accessory mitral valve tissue is a rare congenital cardiac anomaly that was initially described in children in association with other cardiac congenital abnormalities and, more recently, has also been reported in adults. The authors report a patient with genetically confirmed hypertrophic cardiomyopathy who also had a highly mobile, free-floating membrane-like structure in contiguity with the ventricular side of the anterior mitral valve leaflet, a feature consistent with the diagnosis of accessory mitral valve tissue.

The H1 haplotype of the tau gene (MAPT) is associated with mild cognitive impairment.

Mild cognitive impairment is often considered a transitional condition prodromal to Alzheimer's disease. The dissection of genetic risk factors predisposing to mild cognitive impairment is paramount to assess the individual predisposition and reliably evaluate the effectiveness of early therapeutic interventions. We designed a cross-sectional analysis to test whether the occurrence of mild cognitive impairment is influenced by variations of the tau protein gene.

Hb Trento: an elongated C-terminal beta chain due to a new frameshift mutation [beta144 (-A)].

An elongated C-terminal hemoglobin variant, due to the deletion of nucleotide A in codon 144 (nucleotide 63600 GenBank entry UO1317) was found in a 31-year-old woman from Trento (northeastern Italy). This deletion led to the replacement of lysine at beta144 by a serine residue, the disappearance of the stop codon at position 147, and the presence of 12 additional residues, identical to those observed in Hbs Saveme, Tak and Cranston, which result from a similar mechanism. Hb Trento, amounting to 29% of the total hemoglobin, was unstable and had, as the other variants of this group, an increased oxygen affinity.