Prevention of autosomal recessive disorders

Prevention of autosomal recessive disorders is focused on making it less likely that two carriers for the same hereditary disease will have children together.

When the gene is located on an autosome (as opposed to a sex chromosome), it is possible for both men and women to be carriers.

Due to carriers being unaffected (or barely affected), the bad recessive alleles can persist in the gene pool for quite a while, even if the disorder is 100% lethal.

[medical citation needed] Most modern societies have laws regarding incest,[1] with avoiding the genetic disorders caused by inbreeding as one of the major motivations.

[citation needed] These practices are not designed to change allele frequencies and therefore have little impact on future generations beyond the first.

Autosomal recessive pattern, showing how two unaffected carriers can have a child with the disease.
When a population is in Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium , the proportions of each genotype are directly determined by allele frequency as shown in this chart. Mate choice is one of the ways to move a population out of equilibrium , allowing genotype frequency to change even if the underlying allele frequencies remain constant.