Parental consanguinity and nonsyndromic orofacial clefts in children: a systematic review and meta-analyses.

Objective: To assess whether individuals born to consanguineous parents had a higher frequency of nonsyndromic orofacial clefts compared with those with no parental consanguinity.

Design: A prespecified plan for a search strategy, inclusion/exclusion criteria, and data extraction from studies reporting consanguinity in relation to nonsyndromic orofacial clefts (NSOFC) was carried out. Papers reporting observational studies with control populations were included, without language restrictions, and these reports were assessed for quality.