1945
Asia-Pacific Population Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2002
  • E-ISSN: 15644278

Abstract

The main reason for reinvestigating the possible linkage between consanguinity and offspring mortality emerged as a result of the gross disagreement among researchers on this subject. For the purpose of this study, consanguinity is defmed as marriage between relatives who share at least one common and detectable ancestor. There is no common consensus in the field of human genetics or demographic research regarding the biological impact of parental consanguinity on the health of their offspring. However, in this regard it is possible to recognize three broad schools of thought. Adherents of the first school consider that there is an overwhelming possibility of consanguineous parents having an unhealthy child. According to this school of thought, marriage between close relatives is genetically critical, because closely related individuals have a higher probability of carrying the same alleles than less closely related individuals. Consequently, an inbred child (the progeny of a consanguineous couple) will more frequently be homozygous for various alleles than the offspring of unrelated persons (Whittinghill, 1965). To the extent that homozygosity for genes is deleterious, consanguineous marriage is deleterious (Sutton, 1965). In this respect, the genetic load of deleterious recessive genes, usually known as the lethal equivalent, would cause death if present in homozygous combination (Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer, 1971). A number of studies on this subject have focused on an increased level of morbidity (Bemiss, 1858; Rao and others, 1977; Ansari and Sinha, 1978) and mortality (Farah and Preston, 1982; Bundey and Alam, 1993; Bittles, 1994) among the offspring of consanguineous parents. Survey results from a few other sources have also identified a linkage between consanguinity and spontaneous abortion (Neel and Schul, 1962; Al-Awadi and others, 1986) and intrauterine loss (Saheb and others, 1981).

Related Subject(s): Population and Demography
Countries: India

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