Evaluating female nursing students' knowledge and attitudes regarding breast self-examination

Knowledge, attitude, practice towards breast self-examination and associated factors among women in Gondar town, Northwest Ethiopia, 2021: a community-based study

INTRODUCTION

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women, particularly in low and middle-income countries. Breast self-examination is one of the non-invasive methods of screening in which a woman looks at her breast for any abnormal findings like lumps, distortions, or swellings. Despite, realized effects of breast self-examination in detecting breast cancer earlier, the vast majority of the cases still present with an advanced stage.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to assess knowledge, attitude, and practices toward breast self-examination and associated factors among women in Gondar Town, Northwest Ethiopia, 2021.

METHODS

A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted on women living in Gondar town. A simple random sampling method was used to select 571 participants. Interviewer administered questionnaires were used for data collection. Data was entered into Epi-data version 4.6 and exported to Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 25 for analysis. Multivariate logistic regression was used where a p-value < 0.05 was used to identify variables significantly associated with the outcome variable.

RESULT

From the total of 571 women, about 541 participants were involved in the study with a response rate of 94.7%. Of these, 56%, 46% and 45.8% of women had adequate knowledge, favourable attitudes, and performed breast self-examination (BSE) respectively. Women College and above AOR: 3.8 (95% CI: 1.43-10.14) and spouses College and above AOR: 3.03 (95% CI: 1.04-8.84), Women College and above AOR: 4.18 (95% CI: 1.59-10.92) and history of breast cancer AOR: 6.06 (95% CI: 2.19-16.74) and knowledge level AOR: 2.67 (95% CI: 1.18-6.04) were significantly associated with knowledge, attitudes, and practices towards breast self-examination respectively.

CONCLUSION

The findings of this study were considerable for inadequate knowledge, unfavourable attitude and poor practice towards BSE among women. Emphasis should be made on boosting the knowledge, attitude, and practice of the women toward breast self-examination and strengthening the implementation of comprehensive, systematic, and continuous BSE educational programs that were recommended along with a breast cancer awareness campaign.

Attitude and Practice Regarding Breast Cancer Early Detection among Iranian Women: A Systematic Review

Objectives: To determining attitudes and practice regarding breast cancer early detection techniques (breast self-examination (BSE), clinical breast examination (CBE) and mammography) among Iranian woman. Methods: International (PubMed, ISI, and Google Scholar) and national (SID and Magiran) databases were reviewed up to September 2017 to identify articles related to the attitudes and practices of Iranian women concerning breast cancer screening behavior with reference to BSE , CBE and mammography. The screening steps, analysis of quality of the studies and extraction of the papers were performed by two reviewers. Results: Of the 532 studies included initially, 21 performed on 10,521 people were considered eligible. Subjects with a positive attitude toward BSE in various studies were 13.5% to 94.0% with an average of 47.6%. Positive attitudes to CBE and mammography were found in 21.0% and 26.4%, respectively. Participant performance of BSE ranged from 2.6% to 84.7%, with an average of 21.9%. The respective figures for CBE and mammography were 15.8% and 16.7%. Conclusion: Considering the poor performance and low rates for positive attitudes, it is suggested that educational programs should be conducted across the country.