Abstract 1599P
Background
Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in women. In Egypt, it constitutes 33% of female cancer cases and most of them present as locally advanced or metastatic. Carers of breast cancer patients play an important role in supporting patients and can also help improve the level of awareness among their social circle. We studied whether having a family member diagnosed with breast cancer would influence the level of knowledge and attitude of their caregivers towards the disease.
Methods
The study comprised 456 female carers of breast cancer patients attending to a dedicated Breast cancer centre in Cairo. We used a questionnaire that comprised 6 sociodemographic questions, and 39 questions divided into four main domains; individual risk, awareness of breast cancer risk factors, breast cancer screening and questions assessing barriers to screening, current behaviour and future attitude. The correct answers were summed to get the participants’ score and those who answered more than 50% of the questions correctly were considered to have good knowledge.
Results
456 participants were included in the study with a mean age of 38 years. The mean overall score was 46% with 44.1 % of participants reported to have good knowledge. Almost two thirds (65.4%) demonstrated good knowledge of screening. Nevertheless, awareness of risk factors was defective with only 38.4% of the participants having good knowledge. Approximately, 62% reported knowing about breast cancer screening from media while 22% and 6% knew about it from friends and family respectively. Regarding barriers for breast cancer screening, fear to discover breast cancer was the most common factor and financial obstacle was the least reported, 43.4% and 16% respectively. The participants were asked about their willingness for breast cancer screening in the future and the answers were as follow; 82.7% will do self-examination, 70.2% clinical examination and 68.2% have the intention of having mammography.
Conclusions
Carers demonstrated fair knowledge of breast cancer screening but poor awareness of risk factors. Having a family member diagnosed with the disease seems to have a positive impact on future attitude and willingness to perform screening.
Clinical trial identification
Editorial acknowledgement
Legal entity responsible for the study
The authors.
Funding
Has not received any funding.
Disclosure
All authors have declared no conflicts of interest.