Consanguinity and multiple sclerosis susceptibility: A case control study

Abstract

Background: Several lines of evidence point towards the importance of genetic risk factors in the susceptibility to multiple sclerosis (MS). We aimed to compare the rates of consanguineous marriages between first cousins among parents of MS patients and a healthy unrelated control group. Method: This study is a cross-sectional hospital registry based study, which was performed by analyzing the clinical records of patients registered with the Kashani hospital database, and also a control group of randomly selected healthy individuals. Result: MS patients were significantly less an offspring of a consanguineous union than the control group (MS patients=26.1, vs Control=32.7, p=0.03; OR=0.730 95CI: 0.55-0.97) Conclusion: Offspring of consanguineous unions seems to have a lower risk of MS compared to offspring of unrelated parents. This may have implications for inheritance mode of protective alleles in MS.