Although high-dose MeHg poisoning has been shown to cause developmental disorders, evidence that more subtle low-level developmental exposure contributes to these disorders is limited.
If anything, our use of a single parent informant may have led to an underestimation of the potentially more subtle impairments of children with anxiety disorders versus disruptive disorders.
Moreover, deficits in the GSH system have been implicated in the pathophysiology of neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and autistic spectrum disorder [24,30,31,33,38,43,59,69], associated with more subtle dendritic disturbances such as spine alterations.
In later childhood, more subtle optical problems and visual processing disorders occur more frequently in some high-risk groups [ 6 ], and these subtle problems can interfere with learning.
VLBW children are also at greater risk than their normal birthweight (NBW) peers for more subtle deficits including learning disabilities, anxiety disorders, social withdrawal, and social problems [ 2- 9], and are almost 50% more likely than NBW children to require special education services [ 10], even in the absence of major neurocognitive disability[ 11].
But the more common presentation of this disorder is much more subtle.
There are indications that people with borderline personality disorder may have an analogous but more subtle deficit in interpersonal interaction.
Therefore, it cannot be excluded that more subtle variation in AHI1 than those causing Joubert syndrome may have a role in the vulnerability to neuropsychiatric disorders.
