A quantitative study to assess breast cancer awareness among females in Bahawalpur Pakistan

Abstract

The study was aimed to assess breast cancer awareness among females in Bahawalpur, Pakistan. We performed a quantitative cross sectional study from January to April 2015. We enrolled adult women over the age of 18. Trained researchers conducted the interviews in-person. We used SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) version 15 to perform the data analysis. In total, 423 females participated in the study and the mean age of the respondents was 35.15 ± 12.66 year, of which, the majority were married (66.0%), and 45.4% had graduate level education. The participants had a severe lack of awareness regarding breast cancer risk factors. We found that the breast cancer awareness scores were significantly associated with old age (p = 0.012), personal history of cancer (p = 0.005), and occupation (p = 0.040) of respondents. We found no associations with marital status, level of education, residence area, and family history of breast cancer. In conclusion, we observed a severe lack awareness of in the study population of breast cancer risk. To raise breast cancer awareness in this population, there is a great need of culturally appropriate, socially-acceptable and effective breast cancer awareness educational programs.