Rare Variants in Increase Risk for Isolated Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome

Hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) is a severe congenital heart defect (CHD) characterized by hypoplasia of the left ventricle and aorta along with stenosis or atresia of the aortic and mitral valves. HLHS represents only ∼4%-8% of all CHDs but accounts for ∼25% of deaths. HLHS is an isolated defect (i.e., iHLHS) in 70% of families, the vast majority of which are simplex. Despite intense investigation, the genetic basis of iHLHS remains largely unknown. We performed exome sequencing on 331 families with iHLHS aggregated from four independent cohorts. A Mendelian-model-based analysis demonstrated that iHLHS was not due to single, large-effect alleles in genes previously reported to underlie iHLHS or CHD in >90% of families in this cohort. Gene-based association testing identified increased risk for iHLHS associated with variation in (p = 1.8 × 10), encoding a protein involved in functional adhesion. Functional validation studies in a vertebrate animal model () confirmed is essential for cardiac ventricle morphogenesis and that loss of calpain function causes hypoplastic ventricle phenotypes and suggest that human CAPN2 and CAPN2 variants, each found in multiple individuals with iHLHS, are hypomorphic alleles. Collectively, our findings show that iHLHS is typically not a Mendelian condition, demonstrate that variants increase risk of iHLHS, and identify a novel pathway involved in HLHS pathogenesis.