Relationship between consanguineous marriage and spontaneous abortion and stillbirth

spontaneous abortion and stillbirth has always been a devastating experience for the mother and of concern in clinical practice. Since consanguineous marriage is common in Iran, high rates of congenital malformations and genetic diseases result in high abortion and stillbirth. The aim of this paper was to assess relationship between consanguineous marriage and abortion in Isfahan, Iran.
A cross sectional study using a designed questionnaire was conducted. The study population was all married women aged 15 to 50 years. As such a member of households living in Isfahan were identified and interviewed. The sampling method was a multi-stage cluster sampling based on the list of population and household census in 2011 in Isfahan, Iran. Accordingly, the minimum number of samples of 587 households was estimated. However, we interviewed 608 women. The statistical method used in this research is t-test and logistic regression, which is done using STATA software.
The spontaneous abortion and stillbirth rates in consanguineous marriages were higher than non-consanguineous marriages. Of the 484 non-consanguineous marriages, 50 women (10.33%) and of the 124 consanguineous marriages, 22 women (17.74%) had spontaneous abortion and stillbirth. Consanguineous marriage with an spontaneous abortion and stillbirth had a significant positive correlation (P =0.023), and the odd ratio indicated that women who had a non-consanguineous marriage had 94.3% less spontaneous abortion and stillbirth. Also there was a significant positive correlation between age and spontaneous abortion and stillbirth (P The findings suggest that consanguineous marriage seems associated with spontaneous abortion and stillbirth. Also, the study results indicated that non-genetic factors such as age and number of children also could have a significant impact on spontaneous abortion and stillbirth.