Breast self examination by female students of the universite officielle de ruwenzori, butembo city, democratic republic of Congo

ntroduction Breast self-examination is one of the most effective measures strongly recommended for the prevention of breast cancers by means of early detection. Material and method An institution and self-administered questionnaire based cross-sectional survey was conducted among female students of the Université Officielle de Ruwenzori (UOR), Butembo city, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during the academic period 2018 to 2019. Results 215 female students out of 358 were included (response rate: 60.00%). Age mean and median were 22.74 years (95%CI: 22.25-23.24) and 22.00 years respectively. Most of them belonged to Nande/Yira tribe (81.55%; 95%CI: 75.61%-86.31%), the Faculty of Medicine (56.34%; 95%CI: 49.55%-62.90%) and catholic religion (53.49%; 95%CI: 46.75%-60.11%). The absolute majority of them had a basic knowledge about breast self-examination (BSE) (79.44%; 95%CI: 73.45%-84.37%) while only a slight majority has performed BSE at least once (55.71%; 95%CI: 48.88%-62.34%). Only the course of study (Medicine), residence (Butembo city), having basic knowledge about breast cancers and BSE impacted significantly on practice of BSE (Pearson chi2 p-values of 0.028, 0.037, 0.003 and 0.000 respectively). Finally, logistic regressions showed that only basic knowledge about BSE was associated with its practice. The relationship was strong (OR: 6.641; 95%CI: 2.823-15.620). Conclusion The large majority of UOR’s female students have basic knowledge about breast cancers and BSE. However, this fact is not automatically translated in a good appropriate health behavior meaning BSE. More effective sensitization has to be done in order to fix this health problem.