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Endogamy, consanguinity and the health implications of changing marital choices in the UK Pakistani community

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-23, 13:48 authored by Neil Small, Alan H. Bittles, Emily PetherickEmily Petherick, John Wright
The biraderi (brotherhood) is a long-established, widely prevalent dimension of social stratification in Pakistani communities worldwide. Alongside consanguinity, it offers a route for cementing social solidarities and so has strong sociobiological significance. A detailed breakdown of biraderi affiliation among participants in an ongoing birth cohort study in the Northern English city of Bradford is presented. There is historical resilience of intra-biraderi marriage, but with a secular decline in prevalence across all biraderi and considerable reductions in some. While a majority of marriages in all biraderi are consanguineous the prevalence varies, ranging from over 80% to under 60%. In consanguineous unions, first cousin marriages account for more than 50% in five of the 15 biraderi and >40% in six others. Within-biraderi marriage and consanguinity enhance genetic stratification, thereby increasing rates of genomic homozygosity and the increased expression of recessive genetic disorders. The trends we report constitute putative signals of generational change in the marital choices in this community.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Journal of Biosocial Science

Citation

SMALL, N. ...et al., 2016. Endogamy, consanguinity and the health implications of changing marital choices in the UK Pakistani community. Journal of Biosocial Science, 49 (4), pp. 435-446.

Publisher

© Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-06-08

Publication date

2016

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Journal of Biosocial Science and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021932016000419

ISSN

0021-9320

eISSN

1469-7599

Language

  • en

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