Perception of Importance of Premarital Counseling among Medical Students of Tanta University, Egypt

Background: In Egypt utilization of pre-marriage counseling and testing (PMC) is still
limited. Objective: To identify knowledge and attitude of medical students towards PMC.
Method: A cross sectional study at Tanta Faculty of Medicine on 379 students using a
predesigned questionnaire. Results: The majority admit that PMC can detect hereditary
diseases (79.4%) and sexually transmitted infections (73.8%). Among participants, 76.2%
were willing to use free PMC and 18.8% expressed awareness of premarital investigations.
Only 49.7% knew about places providing PMC. Concerning level of information, 27.6% of
participants did not have enough information about PMC. The main sources of information
were mass media (31.8%) and internet (30.0%). The main reason for not utilizing PMC was
not to interfere with “Allah will”. More males (12.5%) think that PMC may delay marriage as
compared to 5.1% for females. Students with consanguineous parents showed significantly
higher level of knowledge than those whose parents were not related. Conclusion: Students
had good perception of the importance of PMC but they did not knew the places and
investigations of PMC.