OBJECTIVES For women, marriage before the age of 18 years has adverse consequences for physical, mental and emotional well-being and constitutes a barrier for continued education. According to a national survey, about 50% of all women in Eastern Turkey were aged under 18 years at first marriage. METHODS This study explored women's opinions and experiences of early marriage and culture-specifi...

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 multidisciplina...

Among the Karo Batak of North Sumatra, Indonesia, marriages between matrilateral cross cousins (impal) are the ideal, yet rarely occur. Further, ethnographic accounts reveal a stated aversion to impal marriage. These observations are consistent with Westermarck’s “negative imprinting” hypothesis if impal are cosocialized. We present analyses of postmarital residence patterns from two studies of...

Marriage between biological relatives is widely popular in many parts of the world, with over 1000 million people living in countries where 20-50+% of unions are contracted between couples related as second cousins or closer. Consanguinity is, however, a controversial topic, in part due to public misunderstanding, complicated by often exaggerated past estimates of the adverse health outcomes. W...

Among the Karo of Indonesia, the frequency of matrilateral cross-cousin (impal) marriage has declined in recent decades. We conducted a vignette experiment to assess the contributions of a handful of factors in shaping this pattern. Surprisingly, we found that cosocialization of a hypothetical woman with her impal led to increased judgments of marriage likelihood and decreased feelings of disgu...

Introduction The daughter of a first-cousin marriage from Saudi Arabia died at age 7y/o of an unexplained periodic fever illness. At two years of age, the proband presented with recurrent fever attacks associated with febrile seizures, severe anemia, septic arthritis, diarrhea, and severe vomiting causing multiple ICU submissions. Considering her ancestry, she was thought to have an FMF-like di...