Prevalence of hereditary tubulointerstitial kidney diseases in the German Chronic Kidney Disease study

Abstract

Exome sequencing (ES) studies in chronic kidney disease (CKD) cohorts could identify pathogenic variants in ~10% of patients. This implies underdiagnosis of hereditary CKD. Tubulointerstitial kidney diseases, showing no typical clinical/histologic finding but tubulointerstitial fibrosis, are particularly difficult to diagnose. We used a custom designed targeted panel (29 genes) and MUC1-SNaPshot to sequence 271 DNA samples, selected by clinical criteria from 5,217 individuals in the German Chronic Kidney Disease (GCKD) cohort. We identified 33 pathogenic small variants. Of these 27 (81.8%) were in COL4-genes, the largest group being 15 COL4A5-variants with nine unrelated individuals carrying c.1871G>A, p.(Gly624Asp). We found three cysteine variants in UMOD, a novel missense, and a novel splice variant in HNF1B and the homoplastic MTTF variant m.616T>C. Copy-number analysis identified a heterozygous COL4A5-deletion, and a HNF1B-duplication/-deletion, respectively. Overall, pathogenic variants were present in 12.5% (34/271) and variants of unknown significance in 9.6% (26/271) of selected individuals. Bioinformatic predictions paired with gold standard diagnostics for MUC1 (SNaPshot) could not identify the typical cytosine duplication ( c.428dupC ) in any individual, implying that ADTKD-MUC1 is rare. Our study shows that >10% of individuals with certain clinical features carry disease variants in genes associated with tubulointerstitial kidney diseases. COL4-genes constitute the largest fraction, implying they are overlooked using clinical Alport-syndrome criteria. We also identified variants easily missed by some ES pipelines. Finally, our results indicate that the filtering criteria applied enrich for an underlying genetic disorder.