Early-onset progressive encephalopathy with brain edema and/or leukoencephalopathy-1 (PEBEL1) is an autosomal recessive severe neurometabolic disorder characterized by rapidly progressive neurologic deterioration that is usually associated with a febrile illness. Affected infants tend to show normal early development followed by acute psychomotor regression with ataxia, hypotonia, respiratory insufficiency, and seizures, resulting in coma and death in the first years of life. Brain imaging shows multiple abnormalities, including brain edema and signal abnormalities in the cortical and subcortical regions (summary by Kremer et al., 2016). Genetic Heterogeneity of PEBEL See also PEBEL2 (618321), caused by mutation in the NAXD gene (615910) on chromosome 13q34.

Episodic ataxia type 9 (EA9) is a neurologic disorder characterized by onset of ataxic episodes in the first years of life. Features may include difficulty walking, dizziness, slurred speech, headache, vomiting, and pain. The ataxic episodes vary in frequency and duration; most tend to occur every few weeks or months and last minutes to hours. Prior to the EA, most patients have neonatal- or infantile-onset tonic or generalized tonic-clonic (GTC) seizures that may be severe and refractory to medication, but remit later in infancy or early childhood, either spontaneously or concurrently with medication. Some patients have mildly delayed development with speech delay and/or autistic features or mildly impaired intellectual development. However, others show normal psychomotor development. Treatment of the ataxic episodes with acetazolamide is effective in about 50% of patients (summary by Schwarz et al., 2019). For a phenotypic description and discussion of genetic heterogeneity of episodic ataxia, see EA1 (160120).