Hyperphenylalaninemia is a hereditary metabolic disorder that causes elevated blood phenylalanine (Phe). Hyperphenylalaninemias are classified as Phenylketonuria PKU (Phe > 6 mg/dL) or mild hyperphenylalaninemia (mHPA) (Phe 2–6 mg/dL). This study examines the cognitive functioning of early diagnosed children with mHPA compared with early diagnosed and treated children with PKU.Psychomotor devel...

BACKGROUND Phenylketonuria (PKU) - the most common inherited disorder of amino acid metabolism, identified in Russia by neonatal screening. The results of dietary treatment demonstrate a positive effect. However, the quality of PKU patients life remains unknown. OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to assess the quality of PKU children life in comparison with their healthy peers, also depending...

Phenylketonuria (PKU) is a metabolic disorder that results in significant brain dysfunction if untreated. Although phenylalanine restricted diets instituted at birth have clearly improved PKU outcomes, neuropsychological deficits and neurological changes still represent substantial problems. The specific mechanisms by which Phe affects the brains of individuals with PKU are yet fully determined...

In 1921, Pearl S. Buck gave birth to a daughter, Carol, who became severely retarded and was eventually institutionalized at the Vineland Training School in New Jersey. To help pay for her daughter's care, Buck wrote The Good Earth in 1931, and then other novels and biographies about her life in China, for which she was awarded the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, and honored around the world. Years ...

Lifelong low-phenylalanine (Phe) dietary management is the foundation of care in phenylketonuria (PKU). However, strict monitoring of food intake places a burden on patients and their caregivers, and adherence to the required diet frequently decreases in later childhood and adolescence. Rarely, parents of children with PKU refuse to recognise the importance of treatment and follow-up for this c...

PHENYLKETONURIA (PKU) which, in Northern Ireland, has an incidence of one in 4362 newborns,' is a metabolic disorder in which the conversion of phenylalanine to tyrosine is impaired due to the reduction in activity of the enzyme phenylalanine hydroxylase. It is inherited an an autosomal recessive trait. If begun in early infancy, a low phenylalanine diet which controls the biochemical abnormali...

Tandem mass spectrometry is a promising new screening technology which permits screening within one analytical run not only for phenylketonuria (PKU) but also for a wide range of other metabolic disorders in newborns. We investigated two symbolic supervised machine learning techniques logistic regression analysis (LRA) and decision trees (DT), where the knowledge is represented in an explicit w...

ur lives are often directed by chance occurrences. For Robert Guthrie, a lifelong interest in the cause of mental retardation came from a retarded son and a dedication to preventing mental retardation in phenylketonuria (PKU) came from the diagnosis of PKU in his wife’s mentally retarded niece. From these roots came Guthrie’s introduction f newborn screening for PKU 3 and, subsequently, to the ...

Phenylalanine hydroxylase (Pah)-deficient "PKU mice" have a mutation in the Pah gene that causes phenylketonuria (PKU) in humans. PKU produces cognitive deficits in humans if it is untreated. We report here the first evidence that the genetic mouse model of PKU (Pah(enu2)) also produces cognitive impairments. PKU mice were impaired on both odor discrimination reversal and latent learning compar...

BACKGROUND Phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH) gene is the well-known causative gene for classic Phenylketonuria (PKU) (OMIM#261600) disease, with more than 500 reported mutations. Through this study, a novel mutation in the PAH gene in an Iranian pedigree with phenylketonuria was introduced. METHODS A consanguineous family with a 10-year old affected girl was referred for genetic analysis. Mutat...