[Carpenter's syndrome].

A newborn boy presented with an acrocephaly characterized by a coronal craniosynostoses, open sagittal sutures and abnormally high and straight forehead. He was the only child of young, unrelated, healthy parents; there was no familial history of dysmorphy. Facial asymmetry was important and associated with posterior cleft palate, syndactylia of the tips and polydactylia of feet, due to a splitting of the first metatarsus. The child also had a congenital heart disease, like in half of the 15 published cases. In older children, mental retardation is usually observed, often associated with obesity and hypogonadism. Polydactylia permitted to exclude Apert's acrocephalosyndactylia in which there is a normal number of finger arms and which seems to be a dominant mutation, while the transmission of Carpenter's syndrome appears autosomal recessive, thus requiring restrictive genetic counselling.