BBC News online ran an interesting article today on the potential health effects faced by the children born to the woman held captive and raped by her father for 24 years, both by the nature of the incestuous relationship and as the result of growing up in windowless cellar.

Without exposure to sunlight, the children developed a deficiency of vitamin D, according to the article, which plays a role in bone formation and could help protect against cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Vitamin D is formed by photochemical reactions in the skin that occur when ultraviolet B light hits it. The vitamin is then converted into an active form in the liver and kidney and circulated through the blood, where it regulates calcium and phosphorus levels.

A lack of vitamin D could also compromise their immune systems, which have likely already been weakend because they have never been exposed to the outside environment and the usual childhood illnesses that help build up immunity.

The low ceilings of the cellar have also reportedly given the older children a permanently hunched posture.

The BBC report says that all six surviving children born of the daughter-father relationship seem to have escaped the potential genetic defects that can occur because of incest. The article has a good explanation of why these defects are more likely in children born out of incestuous relationships.