I must admit that when I first volunteered to review Consanguinity in Context, I had confused consanguinity with ex-san-guinity. Expecting a book about porphyria, rabies, and other possible sources of vam-pire myths, I was quite surprised to instead start reading about inbreeding. However, far from being disappointed, I found Alan Bit-tles' book to be extremely fascinating. Bit-tles provides an...

BACKGROUND Rahim Yar Khan (RYK) District is a multi-ethnic assemblage of both ancient and migrated communities in Southern Punjab, Pakistan. There is a paucity of knowledge on the bio-demographic structure of this endogamous population. METHODS We have carried out a cross-sectional epidemiological study in RYK District and recruited 2174 random Muslim married females. Detailed account of mari...

In France gamete donation and notably sperm donation are anonymous. It has been claimed that anonymous artificial insemination by donor (AID) could highly contribute to an increase in the level of consanguinity and the incidence of autosomal recessive diseases, due to the unions between offspring of anonymous donors, unaware of their biological kinship, with the special case of unions between h...

Background: Our research focuses on different dimensions of families of Turkmen population of Iran with two or more than two affected members. A complete clinical ear test was conducted on them. It was aimed to find families with the highest chance of hereditary hearing impairment among siblings and also existence of consanguinity among their parents. <em...

Consanguinity, the marriage between relatives, has been associated with adverse child health outcomes because it increases homozygosity of recessive alleles. The objective of this study was to assess the effect of consanguinity on the birth weight of newborns in Greater Beirut, Lebanon. Cross-sectional data were collected on 10,289 consecutive liveborn singleton newborns admitted to eight hospi...

OBJECTIVE To examine mechanisms by which consanguinity might increase the risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D) in a Saudi population. METHODOLOGY 362 adult male participants were recruited, 179 were T2D patients and 183 healthy siblings. T2D severity was assessed in patients by recording age at diagnosis. In healthy subjects, diabetes risk was studied by measuring the body mass index, fasting blood ...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to investigate the influence of consanguinity on children's health. DESIGN The study is a prospective survey from birth to five years of a cohort of babies born in a multiracial community. This report details the initial findings on consanguinity. SETTING Participating families live predominantly in three health districts of Birmingham, and were recr...

BACKGROUND While parental consanguinity is known to increase the risk of birth defects in offspring, it is hard to quantify this risk in populations where consanguinity is prevalent. METHODS To support ongoing studies of cancer and of psychiatric disease, we studied relationships of consanguinity to 1,053 major birth defects in 29,815 offspring, born in 1964-1976. To adjust for confounding va...

The Sultanate of Oman, like many other Arab countries, has relatively high rates of consanguinity. Reports suggest that the incidence of inborn errors of metabolism (IEM) is also high in Oman. This retrospective cross-sectional study was designed to evaluate the number of patients with IEM being followed at the only two tertiary centers in Oman treating such patients, and to calculate the consa...