Consanguinity and reproductive health in Iraq.

This study investigated the consanguinity rate of 233 families with severely disturbed reproductive health, and compared it to that of 227 families with normal (moderate) levels of reproductive wastage and to that of 155 families with no reproductive disturbance. The results showed that the inbreeding coefficients of the three groups of families were 0.0358, 0.0241 and 0.0208, respectively. Furthermore, the rate of congenital malformations was found to be highly correlated with the consanguinity rate of these families.