The National Health Morbidity Survey 1996 showed only 34.2% of women aged 20 years and above had done breast self examination (BSE). This data showed the practice of BSE is still low despite of various awareness programmes and activities carried out. A cross sectional study through Systematic Random Sampling was done at Out Patient Department, Kuantan Health Office to know the knowledge and practice of BSE among women aged 20~60 years. The results showed 94.9% respondents had received information about BSE, however only 31.6% knew the appropriate time to do BSE, 14.7% knew the purpose of doing at that time and only 29.9% knew how frequent they should do BSE. 74% of respondents did BSE, however 70.2% of them did not do monthly and 67.2% did not do at the suggested time. There was an association between the practice of BSE with the knowledge and sociodemographic characteristics i.e. educational level, income, ethnic group and marital status.
Key word: Breast self-examination, breast cancer, Kuantan.
Study site: Klinik Kesihatan, Kuantan, Pahang, Malaysia
We report a cross-sectional descriptive study of 90 new long-stay patients (NLS) (i.e. those who had been resident for six months to three years in Permai Mental Hospital, Johor) and studied from April to June, 1995. The age of this sample ranged from 18 to 85 years. Two subgroups were observed (i.e. younger NLS patients aged 18 to 34 years and older NLS patients aged 35 to 85 years). Among the younger NLS patients, the commonest diagnosis was schizophrenia (51.2%), followed by mental retardation with related problems (24.4%). Sixty-one percent of these younger patients had a history of serious violence or dangerous behaviour. Older NLS patients were likely to have a diagnosis of schizophrenia (79.6%), followed by mood disorder (6.1%) and dementia (4.1%). Forty seven percent of these older group had history of danger to others and 57.1% were at moderate or severe risk of non-deliberate self-harm. Focusing on the schizophrenic patients, all of them had some form of psychopathology, either positive, negative or general symptoms and about one-fourth were assessed to pose a risk for aggression.