Abstract
The continuous awareness campaigns about Colorectal Cancer (CRC) directed towards the Lebanese population in order to foster preventive medicine are on the rise. The impact has been positive and reported in previous research, although the number of victims is still high. This paper aims to perform a recent cross-sectional study of Lebanese residents’ CRC awareness by comparing the findings of two studies carried out in the years 2016 and 2018. The samples of the current study include 1140 (2016) and 993 (2018) participants who completed a simple structured questionnaire directed to assess their knowledge of colon cancer and the behavioral intentions of obtaining CRC screening. Upon comparing results, the percentage of those who know about CRC has increased significantly from 40.4% in 2016 to 78.7% in 2018, the proportion of respondents who believed that family history is the major risk factor for CRC did increase significantly from 47.7% in 2016 to 90.8% in 2018. Likewise, the proportions of respondents who believed that overweight, age, and stress are among the major risk factors for CRC increased from 26.9%, 26.7% and 11.3% in 2016 to 86.2%, 52.1% and 21.51% in 2018, respectively. On the other hand, the proportions for the risk factors related to alcohol and smoking have dropped from 37.7% and 37.3% to 27.4% and 24.2%, respectively. Moreover, the most important source of information for CRC was friends (18.4% in 2016 versus 73.8% in 2018), followed by family (18.7% in 2016 versus 56.7% in 2018), and then physicians (18.9% in 2016 and 40.2% in 2018). In fact, the efforts of the non-governmental organization (NGO) SAID (118 different major activities in the span of 3 years) did make a significant difference in what relates to CRC awareness among the Lebanese population. These findings are used to encourage and support other NGOs to adopt targeted new awareness campaigns which have proven successful, and to present evidence based on facts to government officials in the Ministry of Health to support and possibly sponsor national awareness campaigns and preventive efforts to mitigate CRC levels.
Highlights
Colorectal cancer (CRC) continues to be one of the principal global health care issues where recent studies have shown that it ranks second to breast cancer among females and third after lung and prostate cancers among males [1] [2]
The percentage of those who know about Colorectal Cancer (CRC) has increased significantly from 40.4% in 2016 to 78.7% in 2018, the proportion of respondents who believed that family history is the major risk factor for CRC did increase significantly from 47.7% in 2016 to 90.8% in 2018
Results show that the proportion of those who were aware of CRC screening and detection was 57.3% in 2016 which diminished to 48.0% in 2018
Summary
Colorectal cancer (CRC) continues to be one of the principal global health care issues where recent studies have shown that it ranks second to breast cancer among females and third after lung and prostate cancers among males [1] [2]. As for Lebanon, in 2018, 1463 (8.5%) CRC cases out of 17,298 new cancer cases were reported for both sexes ranking in fifth place after breast, bladder, lung and prostate cancers [4] [5]. It is noticeable that the global cancer burden has continuously been increasing whereby in 2012, there were 14.1 million new cancer cases and around 8.2 million deaths due to cancer, the CRC cases were around 1.36 million (9.7% for both sexes) [6]. Further projection studies have revealed that by 2020, overall cancer will reach 361 and 312 cancer cases per 100,000 persons for males and females, re-
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