The Role of Couple Counseling before Marriage in the Prevention of Hereditary and Genetic Disabilities in the City of Qom 2013

The prevalence of genetic and congenital anomalies is higher in consanguineous marriage than that of non consanguineous. Since the majority of these diseases can be preventable through education before marriage, we aimed to evaluate the couple's educational needs about the role of genetic counseling in prevention of genetic and inherited disabilities.
This descriptive- analytic study was conducted on 250 couples who was about to marry. The instrument was a research made questionnaire, including three parts of demographic characteristics, questions about knowledge and attitude, whose content validity and reliability have been confirmed. The data was analyzed by SPSS software with the P-Value of less than 0.1.
Findings: sixty- six point five percent have unconsanguinous and 33.5% consanguineous marriage. The mean and SD of knowledge and attitude were 50.62±10.27, 54.55±7.66 of 100 respectively. There was Significant correlation between knowledge and age (r=0.143). There was significant relation between knowledge and consanguineous marriage (p=0.092). In addition there was correlation between genetic counseling with attitude (P=0.002).
In order to increase the family knowledge and attitude, health system should use different models of health education for couples.