ElSori et al. (2004) reported the first Kuwaiti male infant, aged 3.5 years, with glutaric aciduria type 1. He is the sixth and youngest child to first-cousin phenotypically normal parents and has 5 healthy sisters. He was admitted to hospital at the age of 10 months because of fever, cough, and repeated vomiting of one week duration. After admission, he developed a series of short left-sided seizures followed a few days later by right-sided seizures. Phenobarbital therapy was started. The seizures continued for 5 days. Shortly after, he developed a left hemiplegia, and he was no longer able to sit or crawl and lost his words. Following treatment measures, the patient became stable but with only minor improvement.

In a retrospective analysis of IEMs diagnosed over a 12-year period (1998-2010) in a hospital in Lebanon, Karam et al. (2013) found two patients diagnosed with glutaric acidemia type I. One of these was through newborn screening. The median age of diagnosis was 3-years. 

The Centre for Arab Genomic Studies Work Group (2006) conducted a retrospective study for lipid disorders described at AlWasl Hospital in Dubai between 1997 and 2006. Only one case of GA I was observed in a 3-year-old girl from Oman.

Al-Riyami et al (2012) reported on the types and patterns of IEMs encountered in a sample of 1100 high-risk neonates referred to SQU Hospital in Oman over a 10-year period (1998-2002). MS/MS was used to analyze blood samples from heel pricks. A total of 119 of these neonates were found to test positive for an IEM. Glutaric Acidemia-I was detected in one male neonate.

Coates et al., (1994) described three Saudi patients with glutaric aciduri Type 1 (GAT1).  All three patients presented with typical clinical and biochemical characteristics of the disease.  Patients had normal development between the age of 3 -14 months, after which sudden and severe encephalopathy occurred. Patients also suffered from severe choreathetosis, dystonia, spastic quadriplegia, mental retardation, as well as  frontotemporal lobe hypoplasia and while matter disease.

Moammar et al. (2010) reviewed all patients diagnosed with inborn errors of metabolism (IEM) from 1983 to 2008 at Saudi Aramco medical facilities in the Eastern province of Saudi Arabia. During the study period, 165530 Saudi infants were born, of whom a total of 248 newborns were diagnosed with 55 IEM. Organic acidopathies (OA) were diagnosed in 48 out of 248 cases (19%), which constitute the second largest group of IEM found in this cohort after lysosomal storage disease. Among OA patients, three cases from two families were found to have glutaric aciduria type I. The estimated incidence of this disorder in the present cohort is 2 in 100,000 live births.