Fig. 1.

Werner syndrome patients. Japanese-American WS patient at ages 15 (top left) and 48 (top right) was originally reported in Epstein et al. (1966) showed early graying and thinning of hair, skin atrophy, loss of cutaneous fat and general aged feature. She carried a common Japanese WRN mutation that skips exon 26. A Caucasian WS patients, at age 8 (bottom left) and 36 (bottom right) developed bilateral cataracts, thinning of hair, atrophic skin and thin limbs (Hisama et al. 2006). She carried a homozygous deletion mutation in the helicase domain of WRN gene