Consanguinity analysis of congenital deafness in Northern Israel.

Consanguinity analysis of heterogeneous populations was performed on a group of 82 Israeli Jewish families with congenitally deaf probands, including 37 multiplex families with normal parents, 10 multiplex families with deaf parents, and 35 simplex families with deafness of unknown cause. Representative gene frequency was estimated as .0198, with two to four major gene loci per ethnic group. In both the simplex families and those with deaf parents, the only significant etiology found was homozygosity for pathologic recessive genes. Comparison of these findings in Israeli isolates with those in panmictic populations seems to imply that the genetic loci are not identical in the various isolates.