Study on knowledge, experiences and barriers to mammography among working women from Delhi

Mammography is not a popular screening tool for deducting breast cancer in India although regular screening is associated with reduced mortality from breast cancer.

The objective of this study is to find out knowledge, experiences and barriers to mammography among working women of Delhi.

Cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted from October 2012 to March 2013 among working women from Delhi, India. The study was conducted as a part of ongoing training workshops organized for women on early detection of breast cancer. Total of eight such programs were organized and were attended by a total of 439 women. Each participant got a self-administered questionnaire to fill. Data was entered in Microsoft Excel and analysis was done using Statistical product and service solutions (SPSS) version 21 (IBM).

A total of 439 participants were included in the study. 230 (52.4%) of the women were more than 40 years of age. Only four participants (1%) had not heard about the term mammography before. Less than half (45.1%) of the participants knew correctly the purpose of a mammogram. Only 11.8% of the women knew correctly about the age of getting the first baseline mammogram. Knowledge of frequency of getting the mammogram was also low only 95 (21.6%) correctly knew about it. Only 59 (11.9%) correctly responded that one needs to go to an imaging facility located either in a hospital or elsewhere to get mammogram done. Main experience shared by the women regarding mammography was that 42 (95.45%) did not know anything about the procedure when they went for this investigation. Out of a total of 230 women over 40 years of age only 38 (16.5%) had ever got a mammogram carried out. There is a statistically significant association between education status and practice of mammography (P < 0.05). There were 18 women with family history of breast cancer out, of which 10 (55.5%) had got mammography carried out. 192 out of 230 (83.5%) women over 40 years of age had never got a mammogram done. Main reason 74 (38.5%) cited for this was that they did not know/were not aware they were supposed to go for mammography.

As knowledge and utilization of mammography is low among women, there is a need to have a multipronged strategy to inform women about mammography and bring about a behavioral change along with having a formal national level screening guidelines for breast cancer early detection.