Paper
Wednesday, 19 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Health Issues for Adult Women
The Effects of Education on Knowledge: View and Function of Women Aged 45-65 Regarding Menopause and Osteoporosis
Giti Abbasi, BS and Nadia Hadian, BA. Internal medicine & Endocrine, Endocrine Research Center, Tehran, Iran
Learning Objective #1: Recognize the effective factors on the quality of education of public health specially women.
Learning Objective #2: Evaluate the outcome of a public education research and understand its significance.

Introduction and Aims: Menopausal women, being in one of the most important and complicated periods in their lives, need special health cares and supports. Osteoporosis, the most significant complication of menopause, is the 4th reason of mortality in the world after cancer, cardiovascular diseases and accidents. Therefore an intervening education on menopausal women is essential.

Materials and Methods: An intervening study was performed on 200 women of 45-65 years old, using direct interviews, questionnaires and pretest- post tests. The questionnaires consist of 17 questions about knowledge and views about the reasons   & complications of menopause and risk factors and prevention of osteoporosis and also consist of 10 questions about nutrition, physical exercises, hormone therapy, self examination, mammography and papesmir.

Results: 27.35% of women were illiterate and 73.65% literate. Also, 10.74% were working women and 89.26 housewives. There were no statistically significant relationship between literacy and job and the level of women's knowledge and functions. After intervention, the level of knowledge increased more than 70%. But behavioral change shows only 14% increase.  There is also statistically significant relationship between knowledge & function in the urban area (P<0.05)

Conclusion: According to the results, although literate women have more learning potentials, they receive a poor education due to education weaknesses, lack of references and lack of problem finding. Since these subjects were taught in ordinary language, the results were the same among literate and illiterate groups. This study shows the significance of evaluation of the effective factors on the quality of education and highlights the fact that there should be public education in the society about menopause and osteoporosis.

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