Original Research Article
Year: 2020 | Month: September | Volume: 10 | Issue: 9 | Pages: 26-30
Estimating the Prevalence of Knowledge Regarding Cancer of Cervix among College Going Girls in a Degree College of North India
Aditya Sood1, Raj Kumar2, Anjali Sharma3, Rahul Gupta1
1MD Community Medicine, District Programme Officer, Health and Family Welfare, Himachal Pradesh
2MS General Surgery, Civil Hospital Baijnath, Himachal Pradesh
3Resident Doctor, Department of Microbiology, DRPGMC Kangra at Tanda, Himachal Pradesh
Corresponding Author: Raj Kumar
ABSTRACT
Cervical cancer is the fourth most frequent cancer in women with an estimated 570,000 new cases in 2018 representing 6.6% of all female cancers. We plan this quasi experimental study among college going girls of Kangra City with the following objectives to estimate the baseline awareness regarding the knowledge, behaviours and beliefs about Ca Cervix, its risk factors, and prevention methods. We conducted this cross sectional observational study among college going girls in Government degree college Dharamshala over a period of three months. Self designed, structured, self-administered anonymous close-ended questionnaire was adopted for the data collection of the study. The questionnaire was pretested in a different study setting comprising of similar study population. We defined poor knowledge as score obtained less than 50% of the maximum marks. The data was collected from 397 study participants. The mean age of the study participants was 20.6 years (SD=1.55, Range=17 to 21 years). The mean score had no relation with the type of school last attended before getting admission in the college and the type of locality they belonged to. The overall score, however, came out to be 10.9(SD=3.8) out of a maximum score of 33, which comes out to be nearly 33% and hence the knowledge was found to be poor amongst the study participants. Although the health programs already exist for prevention of cervical cancer in our country, IEC/IPC activities should be promoted in generating the awareness among the young population especially the college going girls.
Key words: Cancer, Cervix, North India.