A heritable disorder of fibrous connective tissue, Marfan syndrome (https://omim.org/entry/154700) shows striking pleiotropism and clinical variability. The cardinal features occur in 3 systems–skeletal, ocular, and cardiovascular (McKusick, 1972; Pyeritz and McKusick, 1979; Pyeritz, 1993). It shares overlapping features with congenital contractural arachnodactyly (121050), which is caused by mutation in the FBN2 gene (612570).
Gray and Davies (1996) gave a general review. They published Kaplan-Meier survival curves for a cohort of British Marfan syndrome patients demonstrating greater survivorship in females than in males; a similar result had been reported by Murdoch et al. (1972) and by Silverman et al. (1995). Gray and Davies (1996) also proposed a grading scale for clinical comparison of the Marfan syndrome patients. The authors provided criteria for each grade and suggested uniform use of these scales may facilitate clinicomolecular correlations.