Annual Research & Review in Biology

Aims: Reproductive behavior of couples, are important for health authorities for planning and policy making. Periodic national surveys, as well as an annual report are being made by the health administrators in every province.
Study Design: A cross- sectional study.
Place and Duration of Study: Thalassemic research center, Mazandaran University of medical science, between January and March 2012.
Methodology: It was a cross- sectional study with the multi stage random sampling. First, three districts were randomly selected. Half of the households selected from each urban and rural residents. Subjects from families were randomly selected from the list of health centers. Validity of the questionnaire for a structured interview was obtained by expert consultation. Experienced female health workers were educated for the filling the questionnaires. Epidemiologic characteristic of couples was assessed by 10 questions. Couples asked if they have planned a pregnancy in near future. Descriptive statistics were used for reporting data. The P<0.05 was considered statistically significant.
Results: Six hundred and sixty families were studied. Age of the man and wife was 39.7 +/-10.5 and 35.5 +/- 10.7 years respectively. Married year's was 14.6 +/- 10.6 per couple, with the sum of 9618 years. Thirty three (5% CI 95%: 2.7 - 7.3) women were pregnant, 38(6.2% CI 95%: 3.6-8.8%) couples were keen to have a near pregnancy. Almost 22% of women were permanently infertile and 82.7% were using safe contraceptive methods. Twenty one (3.7%), 5(0.9%) of families had illegal and medical abortions respectively. About 70% (469) were using contraceptive methods. Most popular safe method was oral pills (20 %). Among permanent methods the most popular one was tubal ligation (TL).
Conclusion: Still a significant proportion of couples are using unsafe contraception methods. However, use of prenatal diagnosis service became recognized.