Consanguinity increases the risk of autosomal recessive disorders in offspring by doing what?

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Consanguinity raises the chance that both parents carry the same pathogenic variant because relatives share a portion of their genetic material from a common ancestor. For autosomal recessive disorders, an affected child must inherit two copies of the harmful variant—one from each parent. When parents are related, they are more likely to both be carriers of the same allele, so the probability increases that their child will inherit that variant from both sides and be affected. This does not change the overall mutation rate, does not protect against recessive diseases, and does not influence how dominant genes are expressed.