Cousin marriage and congenital anomalies in a multiethnic birth cohort.

Congenital abnormalities (CAs) cause stillbirths, infant deaths and many later life disabilities. Infant mortality rates from different communities reflect levels of such birth defects and are often used to compare populations and determine key risk factors. Understanding causation and the high risk groups is clearly worthwhile, with a view to future prevention. Sheridan and his multidisciplinary team present results from a birth cohort collected from 2007 to 2011 in which data from 11,396 mothers, participating in the Born in Bradford study, were linked with details of 386 congenital anomalies identified (and validated) in the same period.