Health literacy and cancer prevention / 中华预防医学杂志

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the literature on health literacy and cancer prevention, screening, treatment and prognosis. A large number of studies have shown that health literacy is positively correlated with public cancer risk awareness, cancer knowledge awareness rate, and cancer screening behavior, and positively correlated with the health service resource utilization ability of cancer patients, treatment compliance, and quality of life, and negatively correlated with the unhealthy lifestyle such as smoking and drinking. Some studies have problems such as small sample size, limited population, and inappropriate design. Some studies do not support the conclusions above. Therefore, multi-center, large-scale clinical studies and cohort studies should be conducted to provide more robust evidence for the relationship between the health literacy and cancer prevention, screening, and treatment.