Acceptance and awareness of breast reconstruction surgery among educated women in Almadinah Almunawwarah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: A community-based study

Abstract

Objectives: Breast health awareness is a necessary subject for women because breast cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers in Saudi Arabia and a major cause of death related to cancer, which motivated us to inspect the knowledge of women in our society regarding reconstruction surgery.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among educated females in Almadinah to determine the awareness and acceptance of breast reconstruction surgery. An online validated questionnaire was used to collect the data. Analysis of the data was carried out using RStudio (R version 4.1.1). Results:We analyzed the responses of 342 participants in this study, most of whom were Saudis (97.7%). The majority of respondents admitted that breast reconstruction is important to them (89.2%); the most common reason among the participants who did not accept breast reconstruction surgeries (22.8%) was a procedural failure. Conclusion: We concluded that the majority of women used social media as their source of information, but we still saw a lack of knowledge regarding the surgical options for breast reconstruction, while acceptance of reconstruction was high.