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NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Program documents two-year pilot as clinic of last resort

HealthCanal.com | October 6, 2011

Genomic tools prove integral to solving medical mysteries

After its first two years of work, the Undiagnosed Diseases Program (UDP) of the National Institutes of Health is citing successes in patients whose cases have stumped specialists at leading medical institutions around the country. The researchers published the program’s first retrospective analysis in the Sept. 26, 2011 early online issue of Genetics in Medicine.

The successes include the diagnoses of siblings whose calcium-riddled blood vessels made it excruciatingly painful to walk, a woman with life-threatening protein deposits in her muscles and a 20-year-old whose diagnosis makes him the oldest survivor of his previously undiagnosed muscle and lung disorder.

“The UDP responds to a critical unmet need, with compassion, clinical expertise and state of the art genomic technologies,”” said Daniel Kastner, M.D., Ph.D. , scientific director at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). “A patient who cannot be diagnosed may cycle through the medical system with no satisfactory treatment plan or be abandoned by the medical system. Through the UDP, NIH provides a glimmer of hope to patients and their families, while at the same time gaining remarkable medical insights.”

The UDP is supported by the NIH Office of the Director, NHGRI, the NIH Office of Rare Diseases Research (ORDR) and the NIH Clinical Center.

The report focuses on 160 patients of the total 326 cases accepted into the program. More than half of the accepted patients had undiagnosed neurological problems. Other prominent disorder categories include gastrointestinal disease; fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome; immune-mediated and rheumatic illnesses; psychiatric conditions; pain; dermatologic disorders; and cardiovascular disease.

So far, most of the solved cases — 37 of 39 cases for which the UDP team arrived at a diagnosis — involved diseases previously encountered in the world of medicine, according to UDP authors. In general, about 500 diseases are common enough to be in any physician’s repertoire for diagnosis, while another 6,500 are known but are exceptionally rare, according to ORDR data.

UDP researchers reviewed, evaluated and diagnosed 23 patients with rare diseases, of which 15 cases reflect extremely rare diseases affecting fewer than 10,000 people. The authors note that while these are known disorders, some lack diagnostic tests or medical definitions to describe them. Rare diseases are defined as those affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the United States.

The program has also delved into the realm of unknown maladies. In February, the UDP announced the program’s first discovery of a new disease, called ACDC, or arterial calcification due to deficiency of CD73, in the New England Journal of Medicine. CD73 is a protein that produces a small molecule, adenosine, which protects arteries from calcifying. A report on one additional new disorder is pending publication.

The siblings whose cases led to discovery of ACDC continue to experience pain while walking more than a short distance. The NIH researchers, however, have obtained approval to start a drug treatment protocol that could improve their condition, which will be initiated within months.

The patient who UDP researchers encountered with an unexplained muscle condition was diagnosed with a rare form of amyloidosis, a condition in which bone marrow produces excess immunoglobulin proteins, which had accumulated in the patient’s muscle tissue. The NIH team referred the patient for a stem-cell, bone marrow transplant, using healthy donor stem cells. The patient has subsequently experienced progressive improvement in her condition.

The UDP team also succeeded in diagnosing the 20-year-old patient with a condition called spinal muscular atrophy with respiratory distress. The condition causes damage to muscles, including respiratory muscles. The patient remains dependent on a respirator for much of his day but last year achieved the significant personal milestone of high school graduation. The diagnosis has allayed the patient’s concern that the condition might at any point impair his learning.

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