Awareness about Preventive Measures that Reduce Risk of Breast Cancer Among Menopausal Women

Introduction: Breast Cancer is the most common malignant cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death in women. There are certain modifiable risk factors that can lower the risk of development of breast cancer. Behavioral choices and related interventions that reduce the risk of breast cancer include prolonged breast-feeding, regular exercise, maintaining healthy diet, maintaining ideal body weight, avoidance of excessive use of alcohol, avoidance of smoking, avoidance of excessive radiation exposure, avoidance of use of extrogenous hormones. Mortality due to breast cancer is found to be high in the developing countries because they seek medical attention at advanced stages due to lack of awareness and low socio-economic status. The risk for developing breast cancer increases after menopause due to increased exposure to estrogen hormone. As there is no uniform education policy for breast cancer prevention and there is no acceptable strategy for breast cancer prevention throughout the nation, we thought to assess about awareness of risk factors, preventive measures that reduce risk of breast cancer in menopausal women.

Methodology: Permission was taken from the institutional ethics committee before starting the research project. Following approval of the research project, questionnaire was made. After that for data collection, consent will be taken from the participants and a questionnaire will be given to them through Google form or physically. Once the data is collected, descriptive data analysis will be done on it to understand the awareness of prevention measures in menopausal women.

Results: This study found that 52.14% of menopausal women who are aware about the preventive measures are either post-graduate women or have family history of breast cancer. Also, it was found that 12.88% of menopausal women have myths/ false-beliefs regarding the preventive measures which was seen in both educated and less educated women. The study also found that 31.1% of women have heard about breast self- examination and 34.2 % of them are actually aware about it.

Conclusion: The study concludes that though some menopausal women are aware about preventive measures and breast self-examination, there is need for more awareness among menopausal women about preventive measures that reduces the risk of breast cancer in them. So, this study calls for intervention programmes to enhance and improve awareness about preventive measures in menopausal women and also to bust myths regarding preventive measures.