Background: Breast self-examination is considered one of the simple noninvasive methods with very low cost, without need for special material or tool. In addition, it is very fast effective method for diagnosis of breast cancer.
Objective: To assess the level of knowledge and practice of breast Self-examination (BSE) among the Iraqi women who attend to the Oncology Teaching Hospital in Baghdad.
Material and methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study. We select any Iraqi women who attended to the Breast Clinic at the Oncology Teaching Hospital randomly regardless of the age. We collect about 150 Iraqi women with varied age, and they came from different region in Baghdad and from other governorates in Iraq.
Results: In this study we found that 64.7% of the ladies had a knowledge towards breast self-examination, but only 34% of the respondents perform it. The major reasons behind the nonperformance of the BSE were either those respondents (34.7%) have never heard about it or about 13.3% don't know how to do it. The major source of information about BSE were the health workers (14.7%) and from TV (7.3%). A significant difference was found in this study between overall knowledge and practice of breast self-examination (P<0.05), and a significant difference between the overall knowledge and the educational level of the participants (P<0.05).
Conclusions: We concluded that poor knowledge among right procedure and practice of breast self-examination in Iraqi women