Colorectal cancer screening behaviors

Selda Tekiner, Gülsen Ceyhun Peker, Mine Ceylan Doğan

Keywords: Primary care, Colorectal cancer, Health belief model, Screening

Aim:

Colorectal cancer screening program compliance in Turkey is around 20–30%. Factors that may affect preventive health behavior, mainly individuals’ values, beliefs and attitudes, should be explored. A “Health Belief Model” (HBM) scale was developed in 1950 to explain the insufficient participation of some individuals in screening programs. The scale was adopted for colon cancer in 2002. In this study we aim to evaluate the health beliefs of relatively young individuals before the age of screening in relation to attitudes to colorectal cancer screening via the Turkish version of the scale.

Method:

A questionnaire composed of 14 sociodemographic questions and 33 HBM scale questions were applied to the patients of a Family Medicine outpatient clinic where the majority of the patients are relatively young people. The data was analyzed using the IBM SPSS version 21.0.

Results:

The study was completed with 215 subjects.
The average age of the participants was 35.4 ± 12.8 years; 62.8% of them were women; 26.0% were students. 58.1% agreed that “A colonoscopy should be done every ten years starting at age 50 to screen for colon cancer.”
Age, marital status, education and occupation status were found to have an effect on barrier scores. Young participants, singles, and those with a primary and/or secondary school education had statistically significant higher barrier scores.
The motivation scores of high school graduates were higher than university graduates. The seriousness scores of men were found to be higher than women.

Conclusions:

Our study points out that attitudes about preventive health measures are mainly associated with age, gender, education level and marital status. These personal characteristics should be taken into consideration while offering screening programs and preventive health measures to individuals in order to protect against colorectal cancer. It is better to give specific messages according to personal characteristics and specific barriers.

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