Abstract
Background: Breast cancer is the most important factor worried women Health in the world.
Methods: Breast self-examination method is perhaps today the most controversial exam. This research has worked out on the women refereed to the Sari Health centers, Iran, in 2001 to improve the efficacy and the compliance of the method for eliminating implication causes in the women, this is a cross sectional analytic study. The data from 420 women coming to the Health centers using a questionnaire were collected. After determining their knowledge, attitude and performance, their relations with some of factors such as age, level of education were analyzed using t-test and Chi-squire.
Results: The mean age of sample was 27.48. 24.3% had a high education and 31.9% used oral contraception. Breast cancer was the most prevalence cancer in women's families. 29.5% have heard about the self-examination from Health practitioners, while only 14.8% learned the method personally. There was a significant relationship between the learning and self-examination (P < 0.001). The awareness of preventive value of self-examination was 77.2%. Only 40.5% did self-examination, of whom 52% did not aware the time and 90% of the suited site of exam. Also, the results showed there is significant relationship between education degree and positive attitude (P < 0.001).
Conclusion: While there was positive attitude to the preventive value of self-examination, but correctly performance was low. Also, performance of the health practitioners for giving attitude, awareness and practice on the self-examination method was very weak.