Mental Disorders and Consanguinity Comparison of First-Cousin Marriages and Matched Unrelated Marriages

摘要

Mental disorders have long been known to run in families. How and why has still not been agreed upon. However, most psychiatrists probably agree that there is no unitary cause, either environmental or hereditary, for the common mental disorders. In each case a number of etiological factors are at work to a variable extent, social, psychological, biochemical and pathophysiological. These include hereditary mechanism, such as predisposition which under certain stress (Rosenthal 1970) can result in a disease. The present paper is intended to give some additional data for the further discussion of the issues involved. It is a part of a larger study of first-cousin marriages and their children. The purpose of this larger study is to investigate various genetic markers among these families as well as their fertility, morbidity and mortality. Here the occurrence of mental disorders in these families will be analyzed and compared with that in the general population. If recessive hereditary traits are involved in the etiology of mental disorders an increased frequence should be expected among children of such families. (ERA citation 05:018039)