Breast cancer in malaysia: are our women getting the right message? 10 year-experience in a single institution in Malaysia.

ABSTRACT

The message that health care providers caring for patients with breast cancer would like to put forth, is that, not only early detection is crucial but early treatment too is important in ensuring survival. This paper examines the pattern of presentation at a single institution over a 10-year period from 1995 to 2005. In Malaysia, education outreach programmes are ongoing, with contributions not only from the public sector, but also private enterprise. Articles on breast cancer in local newspapers and women magazines and television are quite commonplace. However are our women getting the right message? Now is an appropriate time to bring the stakeholders together to formulate a way to reach all women in Malaysia, not excluding the fact that we are from different races, different education levels and backgrounds requiring differing ways of delivering health promotion messages. To answer the question of why women present late, we prospectively studied 25 women who presented with locally advanced disease. A quantitative, quasi-qualitative study was embarked upon, as a prelude to a more detailed study. Reasons for presenting late were recorded. We also looked at the pattern of presentation of breast lumps in women to our breast clinic in UMMC and in the surgical clinic in Hospital Kota Bharu, in the smaller capital of the state of Kelantan, in 2003. There is hope for the future, the government being a socially responsible one is currently making efforts towards mammographic screening in Malaysia. However understanding of the disease, acceptance of medical treatment and providing resources is imperative to ensure that health behaviour exhibited by our women is not self-destructive but self-preserving. Women are an integral part of not only the nation's workforce but the lifeline of the family - hopefully in the next decade we will see great improvement in the survival of Malaysian women with breast cancer.