What do women know about testicular cancer? Exploratory study of a female university population

Abstract

Introduction & Objectives: Testicular cancer (TC) is one of the most common malignancies in young population, and it appears to be increasing worldwide. The cure rate for TC now approaches 100%, but is negatively influenced by the delay in seeking medical attention. Sometimes it’s a man’s partner who spots a change in the testicle. Several publications have showed the importance of the partners in health. There is a lack of evidence about the importance of women, as partners, in the diagnosis of several pathologic processes in men, but we know that the healthy behavior is shaped by the partner. Our objective was to evaluate women’s knowledge about TC, as they can act as educators towards better men’s health. Material & Methods: We performed a survey of 13 questions concerning the awareness of TC and perceived importance of testicular self-examination in 307 women from the university. The questionnaire was sent to the institutional email of students, professors and other workers and the data were collected and then analyzed. Results: The mean age of our group was 26±8.3 years (range 18–58 years). Students were 74.6% (n = 229) of the sample and 25.7% (n = 79) were from the medical course. When asked if they had any knowledge about TC, 89.3% (n = 274) answered they had information about TC. Sixty-four (20.8%) of the participants knew someone with testicular cancer. Only 25% (n = 77) of the women answered correctly to the question about the age group most frequently seen with TC and 57.7% (n = 177) responded properly to the most frequent symptom of testicular cancer. When a paired analysis of the correct answers to the age group of TC and most frequent symptom only 24 (7.8%) of the subjects gave proper responses to every questions. A second part of the questionnaire was about testicular self-examination. Approximately half (50.5%) of the subjects, n = 155, referred knowledge about testicular examination. We used a Lickert-type scale to categorize the perceived importance of this examination from 1 (not important) to 10 (extremely important), with 69.4% (n = 213) considering that this was extremely important (10) and only one participant (0.3%) responded that it wasn’t important. Almost all participants (95.4%) answered that they would advise their male friends to perform testicular self-examination. Conclusions: In this study we have showed a low level of knowledge about TC. Despite this fact, the knowledge about this cancer, a great number of women considered important to men to perform testicular self-examination and were motivated to advise their male friends to perform it. Considering that partners may assume an important role in health promotion and education, maybe women, as the partner of patients in risk of having TC, can be a way of engaging healthy behaviors in men.