Prevalence, genetics and clinical presentation of chronic granulomatous disease in Sweden

To estimate the prevalence of chronic granulomatous disease (CGD) in Sweden, an inquiry asking for known and possible CGD cases was mailed to paediatric, internal medicine and infectious disease departments all over Sweden. The detected patients were characterized as to genetics and the clinical presentation. Twenty–one patients (belonging to 16 different families) were found, corresponding to a prevalence of ∼ 1/450 000 individuals. The patients with X–linked disease, lacking a functional gp91^phox protein ( n = 12), comprised 57% and 43% of the patients had an autosomal recessive (AR) disease lacking p47^phox ( n = 7) or p67^phox ( n =1), respectively. All unrelated patients with X–linked disease displayed different gene abnormalities such as point mutations predicting nonsense ( n = 3), missense ( n = 1) or splice site mutations ( n = 2), but also a total deletion and a unique 40 base pair duplicature insertion. The patients with p47^phox–deficiency showed a GT deletion at a GTGT tandem repeat, and the p67^phox–deficient patient displayed a heterozygous in–frame deletion of AAG combined with a large deletion in the other allele. Three patients died during the study period, two from Pseudomonas cepacia infections. Patients with X–linked disease had more frequent infections (mean of 1.7 per year), than the patients with AR inheritance (0.5 infections per year). The most common infections were dermal abscesses ( n =111), followed by lymphadenitis ( n =82) and pneumonias ( n =73). Inflammatory bowel disease–like symptoms, mimicking Crohn's disease of the colon, was seen in three CGD patients.