Identification of putative pathogenic single nucleotide variants

The incidence of stillbirth in Sweden has essentially remained constant since the 1980's, and despite thorough investigation, many cases remain unexplained. It has been suggested that a proportion of stillbirth cases is caused by heart disease, mainly channelopathies. The aim of this study was to analyze DNA from 290 stillbirth cases without chromosomal abnormalities for pathogenic single nucleotide variants (SNVs) in 70 genes associated with cardiac channelopathies and cardiomyopathies. The HaloPlex Target Enrichment System (Agilent Technologies) was utilized to prepare sequencing libraries which were sequenced on the Illumina NextSeq platform. We found that 12.1% of the 290 investigated stillbirth cases had one (n = 31) or two (n = 4) variants with evidence supporting pathogenicity, i.e. loss-of-function variants (nonsense, frameshift, splice site substitutions), evidence from functional studies, or previous identification of the variants in affected individuals. Regarding identified putative pathogenic variants in genes associated with channelopathies, the prevalence was significantly higher in the stillbirth cohort (n = 23, 7.93%) than the corresponding prevalence of the same variants in the non-Finnish European population of the Exome Aggregation Consortium (2.70%, p