Tests to take before marriage

What you need to know:

  • When clerics insist on HIV, sickle cell and hepatitis tests, it sometimes feel like an invasion of our privacy.
  • However, not only are you protecting your partner by having this knowledge but also educating yourself about the diseases that may cause future problems for your children, writes Beatrice Nakibuuka.

Doctors advise that couples intending to have children should carry out several tests because knowing what you are dealing with enable one to take the appropriate and proper medical care required. This helps couples avoid the stress and problems resulting from the unknown health complications.

Haemophilia
Hemophilia is an inherited disorder characterised by episodes of prolonged bleeding following injuries or spontaneously. The main cause is because blood lacks enough clotting factor, a blood protein that is key in the process of blood clotting.

Dr Henry Ddungu, a consultant haematologist at Uganda Cancer Institute, says the disease is usually passed onto the male child while female children are carriers of the condition.
If a male who has haemophilia marries a woman who is normal, they will give birth to daughters that are carriers of the disease and normal sons.
If a female carrier marries a normal male, they have a chance of giving birth to a carrier daughter and a son that suffers haemophilia as well as a normal son and daughter.

Rhesus factor
Blood group is assigned to an individual as A, B, O and AB but with another component known as the Rhesus factor, which may be positive or negative.
If you are both positive and negative for the Rhesus factor, your blood groups will be compatible and you will not get problems with giving birth. This is also true if the mother is positive and the father is negative.
However, Dr Ddungu says, “If a woman with rhesus negative marries a rhesus positive husband, they have a greater chance of rhesus incompatibility. The mother’s body produces a body defence system to target the red blood cells of the growing foetus. The foetus receives incompatible blood and this would lead to intrauterine death and miscarriages.”

The first pregnancy may not be affected by the incompatibility problem but the subsequent pregnancies are likely to be affected.
Also screen for sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhoea, syphilis, bacterial vaginosis and warts. These once detected should be treated with proper medical care to reduce the risk of infertility and miscarriages during marriage.
You need to screen for diabetes, test for hypertension, certain cancers, kidney disease and thalassemia a genetic blood disorder that results in excessive destruction of red blood cells, which leads to anaemia.

Sickle cell gene
Sickle cell disease is a lifelong and devastating medical condition caused by a defect in red blood cells. The condition makes the red blood cells sickle shaped which affects their ability to pass through tiny blood vessels to supply oxygen to body cells and tissues. Dr Philip Kasirye, the head of sickle cell clinic at Mulago Hospital, says this often causes painful crises among sickle cell patients.

“It is not advisable for sickle cell patients to marry a carrier of the sickle cell gene because of the 50 per cent chance of having a baby with the disease in each pregnancy. However, a sickle cell patient (SS) can marry an individual with no trait of the disease (AA), as their offspring will only be carriers of the sickle cell genes and will not get the disease.