Keeping Abreast: Impact of Whatsapp in Creating Breast Cancer Awareness Among Women

Introduction: The use of social media by healthcare professionals to create disease awareness has been increased worldwide. It is easily available and accessible to the larger number of populations and hence helps in bridging the gap between doctor and patient. Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer among women in India and the main reason for higher mortality among them is the late presentation to the surgeons, owing to various myths and social and physical taboos. We conducted a study to assess the awareness of breast cancer among the women in general population and also to check the effectiveness of WhatsApp in improving women's knowledge regarding the risk reduction, myths, early detection and treatment of breast cancer. The study was a pre-post health educational study including 146 wom Methods: en. Multiple WhatsApp groups were created to share information regarding breast cancer awareness, early detection, risk factors, common myths, self-breast examination and treatment of breast cancer in the form of audio, video, text and images. The group was active for 4-5 days as an interactive session. Data were collected through google forms. We noticed a signicant improvement in the knowledge of women regard Results: ing the common myths regarding breast cancer and the symptoms of breast cancer. There was signicant increase in performance of self-breast examination from 14.4% to 84.6% (p- <0.001). Most of the women found the video of self-breast examination useful. The commonly Conclusion: used social networking site like WhatsApp can be used as a tool to assess the awareness of breast cancer among women. This also helped in exchange of the knowledge among women, which in turn helped in the risk reduction and early detection of breast cancer. This app is a useful tool that can be incorporated into health education strategies that focus on breast cancer.