What is consanguineous marriage?

Consanguineous marriage refers to the marriage between two parties who have the same blood relationship within three generations or less.

Consanguineous couples may acquire the same genes from their common ancestors and pass them on to their children.

If this gene is inherited in an autosomal recessive manner, the children may develop the disease because they are homozygous for the mutation. Therefore, inbreeding increases the risk of certain autosomal recessive diseases.

Extended information: People have realized from countless facts that when men and women with close blood relationships marry, their offspring have a high mortality rate and often suffer from dementia, deformities and genetic diseases.

This is because couples who marry close relatives receive more of the same genes from the same ancestor.

It is easy for harmful genes that are detrimental to the survival of offspring to meet and aggregate (called homozygosity in genetics), thereby aggravating the harm of harmful genes to offspring, so it is easy to give birth to children with poor quality.

Simply put, each of us carries many disease-causing genes in our body. These genes are recessive. Only when a couple carries this recessive disease-causing gene at the same time will the disease occur, and these disease-causing genes are often

It is hereditary. When couples are close relatives, the chance of carrying the same recessive gene will be greatly increased, thus leading to an increased incidence of disease in the next generation.

Marriage between close relatives increases the chance of recessive genetic diseases, such as albinism, congenital deafness and mute; cerebellar malformation, phenylketonuria, galactosemia, etc.; it can also increase the incidence of polygenic genetic diseases, the most common of which is cerebral palsy.

Water, spina bifida, anencephaly, schizophrenia, congenital heart disease, epilepsy, etc.

In addition, statistics show that the incidence rates of polygenic genetic diseases or congenital malformations such as hypertension, schizophrenia, congenital heart disease, anencephaly, spina bifida, epilepsy, etc., among children born from consanguineous marriages are also significantly higher than those from non-consanguineous marriages.