Background: Mental retardation (MR) is a group of heterogeneous clinical conditions. There are more than 900 genetic disorders associated with MR and it affects around 3% of the general population. Many MR conditions described are syndromic, fragile X syndrome being the most common clinical entity among them. X linked mental retardation (XLMR) is subdivided in two categories: syndromic XLMR (MRXS) when MR is associated with clinical features and non-syndromic XLMR (MRX) when MR is isolated.
Aim: The aim of this systematic review of the literature was to join together the results of several studies related to X linked mental retardation and to present various genes implicated in this disease. In this review, focus has been given on genes implicated in mental retardation, the clinical data and on phenotype-genotype correlations.
Methods: An exhaustive electronic and library research of the recent literature was carried out on the Web sites "Science Direct" and "Interscience Wiley". The key words used were "mental retardation", "X chromosome", "gene", "syndromic mental retardation", "non-syndromic mental retardation".
Results: In this review a number of X linked genes, the clinical features associated with the gene abnormality, and the prevalence of the disease gene are discussed. We classified these genes by order of their first implication in MR. A table presented on the XLMR Update Web site who list the 82 known XLMR genes is available as XLMR Genes and corresponding proteins.