Consanguinity - a common human heritage? The effects on the health and well-being of Indian populations

TL;DRAbstract

Th etopic of inbreeding in human populations has long fascinated geneticists, sociologists and philosophers. Among the populations throughout North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia, marriages between couples related as second cousins or closer, still account for 20% to over 50% of all unions. By comparison, in Western societies generally negative views on close kin marriages have predominated, due mainly to historical, social and religious prejudices. As a result, unions of this type are rare in the West.
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\nIt can be predicted that autosomal recessive traits will be more common in the progeny of consanguineously related parents, since they have a greater chance of inheriting identical copies of a mutant gene or genes from a common ancestor. However, in communities with a long and unbroken history of consanguineous unions, it has been hypothesised that deleterious genes would have been substantially eliminated from the gene pool. In addition

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