Study of breast cancer knowledge, attitude, and preventive behaviors among women referring to health-treatment centers in Yazd, Iran, 2015

Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer among all cancers worldwide and also one of the helth priorities in Yazd. Continuing deaths from this disease among the Iranian females is mainly because of the low use of screening behaviors and late diagnosis. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the women’s knowledge, attitude, and preventive behaviorse of breast cancer in Yazd, Iran in 2015.
This study was a cross-sectional study. The participants were 384 women referring to health centers of the city of Yazd selected in 2016selected by the cluster sampling method. Data were collected by a quesstionarre and designed by SPSS (version 16) (t-test, ANOVA and Chi-Square).
The mean age of the participants was 30.31±7.97 years. The mean score of the knowledge and attitude of the subjects was 52.53 out of 78 and 36.29 out of 50, respectively. And, the mean score of preventive behaviors of the cancer was 12.03 (out of 24). According to the Pearson's correlation test, a significant positive correlation was detected between the practice of breast diagnostic examination and the knowledge (P = 0.001, r = 0.177) and attitude score (p = 0.0001, r = 0.257).
Since the mean score of the women’s behavior is lower than the average level, an education intervention plan should be designed and implemented to motivate women to use the screening methods.