Genetic counseling in families of this kind is obviously strongly advisable, with the offer of cytogenetic prenatal diagnosis in pregnancies of translocation carriers. The degree of risk for a pregnancy with an unbalanced zygote to go to term is much reduced in those families showing repeated abortions but may be high in others when ascertained through unbalanced progeny.

The mode of segregation of chromosomes involved in complex reciprocal translocations giving rise to unbalanced karyotypes is similar to that of reciprocal translocations involving 2 chromosomes.