[Animal assisted therapy in a long-term care nursing home]. / Zoothérapie dans un Centre de long séjour.

Animal assisted therapy sessions have been set up at the Bellevaux nursing home in Besançon. The project has required a number of specific procedures and training courses to be put in place as well as the involvement of different departments. The sessions give real pleasure to the residents and produce interesting results.

Genomic Microarray in Intellectual Disability: The Usefulness of Existing Systems in the Interpretation of Copy Number Variation.

Whole genome array technology is an essential tool for the detection of a large number of copy number variants (CNVs) in patients with ID and/or multiple congenital anomalies. However, the clinical significance of some microimbalances is not known. In this article, we succeeded to detect seven new variations of unknown significance (dup12p13.33, dup2p16.3, dupXq13.2, del12q24.33, dup16p13.11, trip4q22.1, and dup9p21.3), one CNV classified as known pathogenic syndrome (del22q13.31-q33), and one CNV classified as potentially pathogenic (del11q24.3). We emphasize the role of comparative genomic hybridization arrays in the investigation of intellectual disability and evaluate the usefulness of existing systems in the interpretation of CNVs.

Neuropathological features in a female fetus with OPHN1 deletion and cerebellar hypoplasia.

We report the case of a 33-year-old pregnant woman. The third-trimester ultrasound scan during pregnancy revealed fetal bilateral ventricular dilatation, macrosomia and a transverse diameter of the cerebellum at the 30th centile. A brain MRI scan at 31 weeks of gestation led to a diagnosis of hypoplasia of the cerebellar vermis without hemisphere abnormalities and a non compressive expansion of the cisterna magna. The fetal karyotype was 46,XX. The pregnancy was terminated and array-CGH analysis of the fetus identified a 238 kb de novo deletion on chromosome Xp12, encompassing part of OPHN1 gene. Further studies revealed a completely skewed pattern of X inactivation. OPHN1 is involved in X-linked mental retardation (XLMR) with cerebellar hypoplasia and encodes a Rho-GTPase-activating protein called oligophrenin-1, which is produced throughout the developing mouse brain and in the hippocampus and Purkinje cells of the cerebellum in adult mice. Neuropathological examination of the female fetus revealed cerebellar hypoplasia and the heterotopia of Purkinje cells at multiple sites in the white matter of the cerebellum. This condition mostly affects male fetuses in humans. We report here the first case of a de novo partial deletion of OPHN1, with radiological and neuropathological examination, in a female fetus.