Abstract overview:
Ankyloglossia is a known congenital pathology of the oral cavity, defined by a restrictive lingual frenulum, which impedes the function of the tongue. Unfortunately, among healthcare providers there is no consensus in definition, diagnosis, classification and treatment for these cases. The mechanism of etiology and pathology is also not fully elucidated. Some investigators linked ankyloglossia with mutation in the gene TBX22, while others referred to it as a manifestation of rare syndromes such as Kindler, Opitz, Van Der Woude, Beckwith-Wiedemann and Simosa.

Aims and objectives:
The purpose of our study is to determine the association of ankyloglossia and inheritance in a population of tongue-tied infants.

Method:
We carried out a prospective cohort study with 51 cases of tongue-tied infants with no other congenital malformation, after examining almost 350 neonates. We used descriptive statistics to analyze our sample (frequencies and proportions).

Results:
Thirty-two tongue-tied infants had a negative family history (62.7%) and nineteen infants (37.3%) had at least one family member with ankyloglossia. Sixteen of them (84.2%) had one relative and three of them (15.8%) had two. The relatives listed in ascending order was the father (31.8%), the brother (27.3%), the sister (22.7%) and the mother (18.2%). The percentage of male tongue-tied infants with family history was 73.7% whilst the female was 26.3%.

Conclusion:
In our study, we concluded that less than half of our cases had a positive family history with ankyloglossia. The limitation of our study is the small sample size. Further studies with larger samples are required to investigate the association of ankyloglossia with inheritance.