(January 31, 2016) Before
the advent of modern medicine, about 10 000 Rh positive children born to Rh
negative mothers were dying for hemolytic anemia in the US each year. Without
the superiority of the heterozygotes – the carriers of both variants of Rhesus
gene, the less abundant allele should be quickly eliminated from any
population. Jaroslav Flegr probably solved 80 years old enigma of coexistence
of carriers of two variants of Rhesus gene in the same population.
A new study published today in PLoS ONE (1) showed that
incidence and morbidity of many diseases and disorders correlate negatively
with frequencies of Rh+ heterozygotes (i.e. the carriers of one copy of the
gene for Rh positivity and one copy of the gene for Rh negativity) in the
population of individual countries. At the same time, the disease burden
associated with the same disorders correlated positively with frequency of Rh
negative subjects in individual countries. Together with the observed worse
health status and higher incidence of many disorders in Rh negative subjects
published by the same research team last autumn (2), this result probably
solved 80 years old enigma of coexistence of carriers of two variants of Rhesus
gene in the same population.