© 2005 BMJ Publishing Group & Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
PERSPECTIVE
Health care
Success in tackling deafness with multi-faceted interventions
1 Consultant Paediatrician, Manor Hospital, Walsall & Senior Lecturer (Honorary), Birmingham University, West Midlands, United Kingdom Hon. Asst. Professor (Paed) Univ. Kentucky, USA
2 Professor of Primary Care Research and Development, Division of Community Health Sciences: GP section, University of Edinburgh, UK
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr A R Gatrad OBE
Consultant Paediatrician, Manor Hospital, Walsall NHS Trust, Moat Road, Walsall WS2 2PS, UK; sec.gatrad@walsallhospitals.nhs.uk
Commentary on the paper by Yoong et al (see page 454)
Keywords: hearing loss; sensorineural deafness; minority ethnic; hospital services
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
The interface between ethnicity, health, and health care delivery is complex, and studying this area is known to throw up somewhat paradoxical findings. In this issue, Yoong and colleagues raise two important observations that we wish to comment on, namely the persistence of consanguineous marriage patterns in British Pakistani Muslim families and, in those families with children with deafness, their access to relevant health care services.1 We consider each of these issues—the first predictable and the second unexpected—in turn.
It is now well known among health professionals that consanguineous kinship patterns increase the risk of recessively inherited disorders such as congenital deafness. It is estimated that the birth prevalence of infants with recessively inherited disorders rises by about 7 per 1000 for every 0.01 increase in the coefficient of consanguinity (F). Among British Muslim Pakistanis, F is estimated at 0.0431 compared with 0.003 for most North European populations.
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Arch. Dis. Child. 2005 90: 454-459.[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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