Self breast examination practice among female students of Tropical College of Medicine, Addis Ababa

Abstract

Background: The breast is a very important part of female’s body. Breast problems and diseases like carcinoma bring distress to women and most women would do anything in their capacity to prevent its occurrence. Worldwide, breast cancer causes 376,000 deaths and about 900,000 women are diagnosed every year. Breast self-examination is an important and cheap method for early diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. Therefore understanding of female health science students practice towards this is indispensable to enhanceits early detection and management.

Objectives: To assess the practice of breast self-examination and associated factor among female students of tropical college of medicine

Methods: Simple random sampling technique was adopted and self-administrated questionnaire was used for data collection. Data were entered in Epidata version 3.1 and analyzed using SPSS version 20.

Results: From a total of333 respondents 58.9% of the students had the practice of breast self-examination. However, only 19% (n=62) of those who practice breast self examination do so regularly and only 27.6% (n=92) of them had the time of practice of BSE is a week after menstruation period.  This finding also indicate that there were strong association between educational level with diploma nurse which were five times more likely than other backgrounds(AOR=5.35, 95%CI=2.26 to 12.70) and those who had information were nine times more likely than those didn’t have information about breast self examination (AOR=8.72, 95%CI=4.36 to 17.44).

Conclusion: The study showed more than half of the study population had significant association between clinical nurse background and those who had information of breast self-examination but the level of practice were poor. This call for an attention to female’s reproductive health care and a need for dissemination of information about the practice through teaching and demonstration to female health science and for non medical background students on how to practice breast self examination for early detection and prevention of breast problems especially breast carcinomas.