What diseases can result from consanguineous marriage?

The so-called close relatives refer to the relationship between people with blood ties within three generations or less. If people with such a relationship get married, it is called close relative marriage. A long time ago, close relative marriage was a common phenomenon, but now such a phenomenon is very rare, and the country strictly prohibits close relative marriage. One of the major disadvantages of close relative marriage is that the next generation is prone to genetic diseases.

What diseases can result from consanguineous marriage?

The disease rate among children of consanguineous marriages is more than five times that among children of non-consanguineous marriages. Since both parties have a common ancestor, they have many identical genes (including normal and abnormal ones), and the closer the relationship, the more identical genes they have. If they marry each other, the chance of their offspring becoming homozygous will greatly increase. Not only does consanguineous marriage increase the incidence of recessive genetic diseases, but it also slightly increases the incidence of multi-gene genetic diseases, such as hypertension, congenital heart disease, schizophrenia, asthma, anencephaly, spina bifida, cleft lip and palate, etc. Therefore, prohibiting marriage between close relatives is an effective measure to reduce the birth of genetic diseases and congenital malformations.

Anything could be hereditary, it's not just an intellectual problem as everyone thinks.

In the case of close relatives, the genetic genes of both parties are more similar, and the probability of both of them having a certain genetic disease at the same time is greater, so the children born from this are more likely to have genetic diseases.

Why is it said that marriage between close relatives is more likely to lead to genetic diseases?

First of all, we need to understand what genetic genes are and know that a child's genes are inherited from both parents. So a child will look partly like the father and partly like the mother. Unfortunately, human genes are not perfect so far. All people's DNA will have more or less some implicit defects. Such defects will not be expressed in physical signs, but some genetic defects, when they exist in both parents' DNA, will change from implicit to explicit and be passed on to the next generation. This is the genetic disease we often hear about.

Since the probability of close relatives having the same genes is very high, the chance of some recessive genetic defects becoming a reality and being passed on to the next generation is greatly increased, and the child is very likely to develop various genetic diseases such as albinism and hydrocephalus. For non-consanguineous marriages, since the two men and women are not related by blood and have very few identical genes, their offspring are less likely to suffer from genetic diseases.