BEIJING — More than 61 percent of Chinese newlywed couples went for premarital health checkups in 2018, significantly higher than the figure of 2.7 percent in 2004, said the National Health Commission (NHC).

Multiple measures have been taken in recent years, such as introducing relevant legislation, offering free premarital health checks, and setting up more institutions providing relevant services, to encourage more people to undergo such checkups, according to a document released by the NHC on May 19.

A total of 22 provincial-level regions are providing free premarital checkups for all newlyweds in their regions by incorporating the service into their government-backed public health service systems.

More than 102 million people went for the checkups across the country between 2004 and 2018.

A total of 3,502 institutions and about 25,000 personnel have been approved to provide relevant services and a survey of 2,699 county-level maternal and child health care institutions in China showed that such checkups are available at over 86 percent of such sites.

Thanks to such checks, infectious and genetic diseases among relevant groups are better under control, said the NHC, adding that from 2004 to 2018, 8.73 million people have been diagnosed with certain diseases during the checkups.

The incidence of fetus edema syndrome, a genetic disease, has decreased by over 90 percent in some provincial-level regions like South China's Guangdong and Guangxi.