ABSTRACT

Even though the health sciences develop, the interventions in diagnosis and therapy develop and change rapidly, the sensitivity of the society about the risks of health increases; breast cancer still remains to be a global issue which threatens the life of women. Breast cancer worldwide takes the first place in between the whole types of cancer that have been observed among women. It comes as the second after the lung cancer when men and women together concerned. The surprisingly rapid increment of cancer incidence data in Turkey which is a low-middle income based country, makes it obligatory to focus on the studies of the early diagnosis.

Until the recent years; breast self-examination (BSE) for diagnosing the breast cancer in early stage, was introduced as an application that has to be applied by the women and guarantees their life. BSE has also been mentioned in breast cancer scanning guidelines by the authorities. In the last few years randomized controls in various studies showed that BSE is not efficient enough for early diagnosis and according to this fact, the breast health authorities agreed that BSE is important to raise the awareness as a scanning method; however it has a limited effect alone on the breast cancers’ mortality. On the other hand; it can’t be refused that costless BSE takes an important place and role in the low-middle income countries like Turkey, where all the people don’t have health insurances and enough budget to effort the expensive routine mammography control.