Knowledge and Attitudes of Women about Breast Cancer, Self Breast Examination and Healthy Life Style Behaviours

Abstract

Objective: The present study was conducted to determine the knowledge and attitudes of female students, who have just started to attend university, about breast cancer, self breast examination and healthy life style behaviours.Materials and Methods: This descriptive study consisted of 384 female university students who started to attend Erciyes University in the 2009-2010 academic year. Three hundred and thirty one women were included in the study. Data were collected with an Individual Information Form including questions regarding socio-demographic characteristics, with a Questionnaire Form to determine knowledge and attitudes of women about breast cancer and self breast examination and with a Health Promoting Life Style Profile Scale (HPLP-II) to determine healthy life style behaviours. Data were analyzed with mean and percentage values, Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis H tests on SPSS version 17.0 package program.Results: The mean age of the women was 19.37±1.3 (min-max) years. It was determined that the majority of women had inadequate knowledge about symptoms of breast cancer, the population at risk and how to do the self breast examination. Of the women, 13.3% did self breast examination. Women who knew women with breast cancer carried out significantly more self breast examinations (p<0.05). The total scores of HPLP-II Scale of women were significantly different between knowledge about breast cancer and knowing the importance of early diagnosis in breast cancer (p<0.05).Conclusion: As a consequence, it may be concluded that educating women about breast cancer and self breast examination at younger ages is important in order to achieve early detection of breast cancer, which is common among women.

Keywords

• young woman
• breast cancer
• self breast examination
• health promotion