Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 628

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Pathogenic Mitochondrial DNA Mutations Are Common in the General Population

Open access
Elliott, Hannah R., Samuels, David C., Eden, James A., Relton, Caroline L., Chinnery, Patrick F.·2008·The American Journal of Human Genetics

Abstract

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations are a major cause of genetic disease, but their prevalence in the general population is not known. We determined the frequency of ten mitochondrial point mutations in 3168 neonatal-cord-blood samples from sequential live births, analyzing matched maternal-blood samples to estimate the de novo mutation rate. mtDNA mutations were detected in 15 offspring (0.54%, 95% CI = 0.30-0.89%). Of these live births, 0.00107% (95% CI = 0.00087-0.0127) harbored a mutation not detected in the mother's blood, providing an estimate of the de novo mutation rate. The most common mutation was m.3243A-->G. m.14484T-->C was only found on sub-branches of mtDNA haplogroup J. In conclusion, at least one in 200 healthy humans harbors a pathogenic mtDNA mutation that potentially causes disease in the offspring of female carriers. The exclusive detection of m.14484T-->C on haplogroup J implicates the background mtDNA haplotype in mutagenesis. These findings emphasize the importance of developing new approaches to prevent transmission.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.07.004

Cites

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cited by

See all 628

Metadata

Authors
Elliott, H. R., Samuels, D. C., Eden, J. A., Relton, C. L., & Chinnery, P. F.
Venue
The American Journal of Human Genetics
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2008-08
Volume
83
Issue
2
Pages
254-260
ISSN
0002-9297 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W1967511612
Cited by
628
References
0
FWCI
13.90
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Pathogenic Mitochondrial DNA Mutations Are Common in the General Population. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.07.004
The paper
Elliott, H. R., Samuels, D. C., Eden, J. A., Relton, C. L., & Chinnery, P. F. (2008). Pathogenic Mitochondrial DNA Mutations Are Common in the General Population. The American Journal of Human Genetics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2008.07.004

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.