Biomedical Research

Background: Hepatitis B is one of the most important liver diseases that would often lead to liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma [HCC]. Compliance with preventive behaviors, particularly by women, has an important role not only in their health but also it would be lead to the family health. Health belief model [HBM] is one of the health education models which is widely used to assess people' beliefs about preventive behaviors. Objectives: Due to the importance of hepatitis B vaccination in both women and their family health, in this study we aimed to evaluate pre-marriage women knowledge, health beliefs, and intention of hepatitis B vaccination. Patients and Methods: We conducted our study in two centers in Karaj that are two predominant referral centers for pre-marriage couples to follow the pre-marriage urine and blood tests. 70 pre-marriage women were selected by random. The subjects completed a questionnaire containing demographic characteristics, knowledge, health belief constructs and their intention of hepatitis B vaccination. Then we evaluated relationship between variables using descriptive statistics [such as frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation] as well as independent t-test, chi-square, Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficient. Results: The mean age of participants was 29.63 ± 3.857, about 47.1% were undergraduate, and 50% were employed and 50% others were housewife; monthly income of 82.9% of employed individuals was less than $330. 32.9% declared that they have intention to do hepatitis B vaccination within next two months. Intention of hepatitis B vaccination had significant correlation with perceived (P=0.037) barrier and self-efficacy (P<0.001). There was a significant difference between perceived susceptibility (P=0.034) and self-efficacy (P=0.003) of people with different intentions to hepatitis B vaccination. Conclusion: Given the direct correlation between behavioral intention with perceived barriers and self-efficacy, and also due to low intention of hepatitis B vaccination among pre-marriage women, it seems that holding appropriate educational programs based on HBM to increase pre-marriage women self-efficacy and reduce barriers, can play an important role in increasing individuals intention of hepatitis B vaccination. Remarkably, increasing pre-marriage women immunity against hepatitis B is very important for both mothers' and their children's health

Author(s): Azam Raoofi, Anoshirvan Kazemnejad, Seyed Moayed Alavian, Effat Hatefnia
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