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Consanguinity and Birth Defects among Arabs in Jerusalem
From Clinical Genetics, an article by R. Bromiker, et al. (Link found at Gene Expression.)The aim of this work was to determine the impact of parental consanguinity on congenital malformations in a mixed urban and rural Arab community in Jerusalem, Israel. ... Of 561 infants, 253 (45%) were born to consanguineous couples. The incidence of major congenital malformations in the offspring was 8.7, 7.1 and 2.6% in cases of first cousins, all consanguineous, and non-consanguineous couples, respectively. ... Parental consanguinity was also associated with an increased incidence of death in previous siblings ... Consanguineous marriages have been described as an important factor contributing to an increased occurrence of congenital malformations and subsequent morbidity and mortality among the offspring. With in the general population, the incidence of congenital malformations spans a wide range. With few exceptions, the frequency of major malformations reported in western countries ranges between 1.0 and 2.4%. By contrast, the risk for congenital malformations in the offspring of marriages between first cousins has been reported to range between 2.9 and 8.0%. ... The increased incidence of genetic abnormalities in the offspring of consanguineous couples most likely arises from the homozygous expression of recessive genes inherited from their common ancestors. The incidence of major malformations found in the current study in the offspring of first cousins (8.7%) was more than three times higher than that in the newborns of unrelated parents (2.6%). This incidence is higher than that generally reported in the western literature; however, in other publications from the Middle East, an even higher ncidence was reported. ...
Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-07-24 |
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