In Gujarat, three siblings emerge as seventh case of rare mental disorder worldwide

“There could be similar cases in the country but they have not been registered or recorded yet,” Dr Frenny Sheth

MITTAL CHAVDA is 12. She cannot go to the toilet by herself, she cannot talk, and her parents have to keep asking whether she wants to eat or drink water. “She has only recently learnt to swallow food,” her mother, Kanchan, said. Mittal, along with siblings Prarthna, 10, and Bhavik, 28 months, were born with what the medical world calls type-42 mental retardation — an extremely rare kind of intellectual disability.

So rare, in fact, that theirs is the first registered case in India. “There could be similar cases in the country but they have not been registered or recorded yet,” Dr Frenny Sheth, head of Cytogenetics department at the Institute of Human Genetics (IHG), Ahmedabad, said. “Till date there have been six cases of this kind of mental retardation recorded the world over,” she said. “The case of the Chavda family will be the seventh.” The siblings, along with their parents Haresh and Kanchan Chavda, come from Hanumanpura village in Botad district. The children are part of a functional study that attempts to document their life. The study is being conducted by scientists at IHG, who are in the process of publishing a detailed analysis of the case in PubMed, a bibliographic database for biomedical literature.

The case of Chavda family is expected to make it to the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in May, and the process of peer-reviewing of the case is going on, IHG doctors said. Kanchan said the children get seizures — often at the same time; they cannot communicate; they are malnourished; and they need to be constantly looked after. “My patience and energy levels are tested every day handling them,” she said. “We were told about a genetic problem after our first child, but we did not know that each child would turn out this way.”

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Haresh said, “The priest in our village assured us that the child will be normal as he is a boy. That is why we decided to have the third baby.” Having studied till Class IV, Haresh, 37, is a construction supervisor and earns around Rs 8,000 a month. Dr Frenny Sheth said, “In most cases the child gets a ‘bad gene’ from one parent but here they have got the ‘bad gene’ from both.”

As a sleepy Bhavik came up to her, Kanchan, weeping, said, “I do not understand studies and research. All I know is that the society always blames the woman if something is wrong with the child. I took a chance with the third child, hoping I could prove otherwise. But… there are days when I want to run away from all this but I know that they have no one except me.”

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