World rare disease day: ‘Stop marriages within families if you want healthy children’

KARACHI:

Around 67 per cent marriages take place within the families, which is a major cause for genetic disorders among children, said the medical director at the Institute of Blood Diseases and Bone Marrow Transplantation, Dr Tahir Shamsi, at World Rare Disease Day seminar organised on Thursday.

Dr Shamsi said that the parents of such children are healthy but the gene of their hereditary diseases is found in their DNA. When their parents’ affected gene is transferred to the child, it then causes Lysosomal Storage Disorders - which affects the child’s mental and psychical health. In this condition, the children’s liver and spleen enlarges and expands their stomach. It also weakens their nervous system that leaves them physically challenged, he explained.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 28^th, 2014.