Contraception: awareness and choice of young users

Abstract

Aim. To determine awareness about family planning and contraceptive preferences among young people.
 Materials and methods. Internet questioner about knowledge, preferences, personal experience of contraception usage. 1010 responders (935 from Russia, 75 from other countries) were processed by statistical methods in the IBM SPSS Statistics program. The group was a simple random sample.
 Results. 92.5% of foreign and 54.2% of Russian respondents with medical specialties do not consider a stroke as a contraindication to combined oral contraceptives COCs (p0.001); 45.3 and 42.2% respondents have similar views about breast cancer in the anamnesis. Uncomplicated varicose veins and uterine fibroids are mistakenly considered contraindications to COCs by 26.4 and 20.8% of foreign participants and 54.5 and 44.4% of Russian participants, respectively. 25.1% healthcare providers from Russia consider hormonal contraception (HC) a possible cause of infertility. Only 4% of Russians of non-medical specialties know about strokes and heart attacks as complications of COCs, 13.8% about arterial hypertension; almost half of foreign participants have such knowledge (p0.05). Every second respondent from Russia and every third from other countries does not know about the timing of use of emergency contraception. Russian and foreign participants, when they were using HC, respectively noted: decreased libido (29.1 and 13%), increased body weight (15.0 and 34.8%), headache (21.8 and 17.4%), mastalgia (20.6 and 13.0%). Every fifth participant did not want to have periods of menstrual bleeding when using HC. 86 women have had pregnancies before, from those 62.2% of Russian and 75% of foreign participants had unplanned pregnancies; 40.2% of respondents from Russia and 25% of foreign participants terminated pregnancy. The most popular contraceptive method among Russian and foreign respondents is male condom (92.7 and 84.6%; p=0.037). Second most popular in Russia is coitus interruptus (57.7%), in third place are COCs (33.1%); among foreign participants COCs are in second place (38.5%).
 Conclusion. Family planning awareness among young people is insufficient, which is reflected in their contraceptive preferences. Knowledge of family planning and highly effective methods of contraception should be popularized.