What are the diseases caused by consanguinity? What are the consequences of consanguinity?

What are the diseases caused by consanguinity?

Children born of marriages of people who are genetically related from the same family face very serious health risks. Studies show that women are more aware of these risks than men.

Consanguineous marriages lead to cognitive problems, health problems such as heart defects and hearing impairment. It also causes genetically inherited diseases. It also increases the chance that a child who inherits two copies of a faulty gene from a common ancestor will continue to be a carrier of other recessive genetic disorders.

Children born of consanguineous marriages are at risk of inheriting homozygous pathogenic alleles that may predispose to rare autosomal recessive diseases. In some genetic disorders; It also shows that kinship relationships are effective between health conditions such as phenylketonuria (PKU), immunodeficiency disorders, childhood hypertension, beta thalassemia, protein C and protein S deficiency, low birth weight and Down syndrome.

What are the consequences of consanguinity?

Consanguinity is a type of marriage that is not recommended today. Many types of genetic diseases occur in consanguineous marriages. In such marriages, children are born sick. There are many diseases that occur as a result of consanguineous marriage. This;

-Stillbirth

-Sickle cell anemia

– Intellectual disability

-thalassemia

– Congenital abnormalities

-Coffee

There are cystic fibrosis diseases.

Consanguinity Precautions

Most diseases that can occur as a result of a consanguineous marriage should be screened in utero before the child is born. In general, if there are known diseases in the family that are technically diagnosed or if the couple has sick children, the baby in the womb will be examined for these diseases.

In general, couples who have consanguineous marriages also get a carrier test for Mediterranean anemia, which is very common in our country. If there is pregnancy, it is recommended to follow this process with an ultrasound examination. At the same time, it is advisable to monitor development after birth, limit the number of children and wait at least 3 to 4 years for a second child.

In consanguineous marriages, the risk of non-dominant diseases occurring due to a pair of genes carried in hereditary material by the couple increases due to the fact that both are defective.

If errors occur in only one of these non-dominant genes and if no symptoms of disease occur, people will still become carriers of the disease despite their health. This situation is passed down from generation to generation. For non-dominant diseases to occur in children, the mother and father must carry the same defective gene.