title: 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.
  
  
  METHODS
  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.
  
  
  RESULTS
  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 95%CI: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.
authors.forename: Helia
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Maghzi
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.
authors.forename: Vahid
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Shaygannejad
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, Shreveport, LA, USA.
authors.forename: Alireza
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Minagar
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.
authors.forename: Akbar
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hassanzadeh
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Electronic address: hadi.maghzi@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Amir-Hadi
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Maghzi
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D003241:Consanguinity; D005260:Female; D020022:Genetic Predisposition to Disease; D006801:Humans; D007492:Iran / Q000453:epidemiology; D008297:Male; D009103:Multiple Sclerosis / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000235:genetics*; D012042:Registries
keywords: Consanguineous marriage; Familial kinship; Genetic risk factors; Iran; Multiple sclerosis