Fertility awareness among pre-marriage couples in Iran
Maryam Mohammadi (IR), Samira Vesali (IR), Behnaz Navid (IR), Ahad Alizadeh (IR), Reza Omani Samani (IR)
[Mohammadi] Department of Epidemiology and Reproductive Health, Reproductive Epidemiology Research Center, Royan Institute for Reproductive Biomedicine, ACECR, Tehran, Iran, [Vesali] Department of Epidemiology and Reproductive Health, Reproductive Epidemiology Research Center, Royan Institute for Reproductive Biomedicine, ACECR, Tehran, Iran, [Navid] Department of Epidemiology and Reproductive Health, Reproductive Epidemiology Research Center, Royan Institute for Reproductive Biomedicine, ACECR, Tehran, Iran, [Alizadeh] Department of Epidemiology and Reproductive Health, Reproductive Epidemiology Research Center, Royan Institute for Reproductive Biomedicine, ACECR, Tehran, Iran, [Omani Samani] Department of Epidemiology and Reproductive Health, Reproductive Epidemiology Research Center, Royan Institute for Reproductive Biomedicine, ACECR, Tehran, Iran
Objective: Fertility awareness refers to health literacy and knowledge about all subjects needs for a good pregnancy and the lack of this cause hard pregnancy and increase infertility duration. The purpose of this study is to evaluate fertility awareness and desire to have children among couples who were referred to premarital counseling center. Methods: This cross sectional study was carried out on 300 pre-marriage couples in Tehran, Capital of Iran from January to April 2016. Men and women answered a self-administered questionnaire separately. This questionnaire covered all issues of reproductive health, consisted of: fertility awareness, knowledge about contraception, sexually transmitted diseases (STD), abortion. Statistical analyses were carried out with R version 3.2.1. Main analyses were paired and independent t-test. Results: 95.8% of the respondents wished to become parent in the future about half of them wanted two children. Good level of knowledge was seen about contraception in 24.9%, about Fertility awareness in 51.3%, about STD in 27.25%, about abortion in 44.12% and about pre-natal screening in 32.2%. Acceptable information about all aspects of reproductive health awareness was seen in 44.69% of the cases and was significantly higher in males using paired t-test (P=0.001). In contraceptive methods, total awareness mean score was significantly higher in men than women (P=0.001). In sexually transmitted diseases, knowledge was significantly lower in females than males (P=0.019). Finally, awareness of miscarriage was significantly higher in women than men (P<0.001). Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, this was the first study that assessed fertility awareness issues in a sample group of Iranian community. It revealed the necessity of detail education about the issue among Iranian people.