Conhecimento, atitude e prática de mulheres sobre o exame de prevenção do câncer de colo uterino

Despite the existence of screening programs, cervical cancer is responsible for high mortality rates in Brazil. This way, understanding what women know, what they think and how they act concerning cervical cancer prevention is critical to target educational practices whose aim are to increase its adherence. In this sense, the general purpose of this work was to evaluate the knowledge, attitude and practice of women about taking prevention of cervical cancer. We conducted an integrative review for identifying the literature which educational strategies used in the prevention of cervical cancer. The sample consisted of 12 articles published in Portuguese, English and Spanish between 2009 and 2014, available in PUBMED, MEDLINE, LILACS, BDENF and CENTRAL. The main educational strategies identified were educational videos, brochures, printed invitations, illustrative guides, television messages, telephone contact, home visits and educational activities. The original article entitled "Knowledge, attitude and practice of women about taking prevention of cervical cancer," aimed to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) of women on the examination of prevention of cervical cancer and its association with sociodemographic variables. It was a cross-sectional study, performed in Basic Health Units (UBS) of the Health District V, in the Recife-PE municipality. The study sample consisted of 500 women aged between 25 and 64 years old. For data collection used a semi-structured questionnaire applied during home visits. In analyzing the data, after women’s KAP classification on the prevention of cervical cancer, the prevalence of adequacy was calculated in each area evaluated with the chi-square test. The evaluation of the profile factors which could significantly influence women’s KAP was done through the construction of contingency tables and the application of Chi-square test for independence. In cases where the test assumptions were not met, Fisher's exact test was applied. It was found that 35.2% of women had adequate knowledge about the prevention of cervical cancer, 98% and 70,6% have proper attitude and practice adequate, respectively. In multivariate analysis, among the variables proper knowledge presented statistical association with sociodemographic variables, such as number of children, income and religion. Not having children (p = 0.044), having a family income of two minimum wages (p = 0.011) and having spiritualist or African-Brazilian religion (p = 0.018) were statistically significant regarding proper cervical cancer knowledge. Among women who did not taking prevention of cervical cancer (5.4%) the stated reasons were: lack of interest (32.4%), shame (17.6%), lack of time / absence of sexual partner (both 14.7%), dislikes (11.8%) and fear (8.8%). Inadequate knowledge associated with the reasons given by women for not performing the CCU prevention examination Realize the need to carry out educational activities by nurses in order to empower them about the issue and encourage accession.