ABSTRACT
Background/aim: Breast cancer (BC) is a major health threat to women of reproductive age, including female university students.
Female students’ lifestyles such as unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, non adoption of screening practices may prone themto this disease. Screening practices to ensure early detection such as Breast Self-Examination (BSE), Clinical Breast SelfExamination (CBE) are cost effective but not often practiced. Being a non-science faculty in a remote area calls for urgent attention. This study investigated knowledge and adoption of screening practices (SP) against BC among female law students at Osun State University, Nigeria.
Materials/Method: The descriptive cross-sectional used a researchers designed, semi-structured and self-administered
questionnaire to purposively recruit 250 female law students. Knowledge of BC SP was measured using 7-items of 14-points scores
(0-8 as ‘poor’; 9-14 as ‘good’). Practice score was measured with 8 items of 20-points scores, which gave ‘poor practice’ (0-10) and
‘good practice’ (11-20). Data was analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics with SPSS version 23 (p = 0.05).
Results: One third (31.2%) were within 25-29 age group; 78.0%were single and 30.8% were in their first year. Overall, 98.0%had good knowledge of SP with 40% adopting screening practices: where 44.0 do regular BSE and 36.0% ensured uptake of CBE from doctors/nurses respectively with 28.0% reporting abnormality. Knowledge and screening practices were associated with age, level of study, and religion (p<0.05).
Conclusion: Good knowledge but low screening practices existed. Respondents need a tailored health information to encourage
adoption of screening measures.
Keywords: Breast cancer, Screening, Knowledge, Practice, Law students