[The importance of women's knowledge about cervical carcinoma and its effect on early detection].

The importance of women information on CC and its impact on their motivation for detection examinations was assessed through a poll of 3474 women (1957 from Novi Sad and 1157 from several villages in Vojvodina). The knowledge about CC reflected a rather poor and insufficient impact of standard education (5.0% in urban, 7.93% in rural areas), newspapers and magazines (4.4% in urban, 5.3% in rural areas), radio and TV (9.3% in urban, 14.7% in rural areas), specialized health magazines and books (about 7-8%), while the impact of conversation with women--14.0% in urban and 18.8% in rural areas, and of different sources--33.3% in urban and 19.8% in rural areas, was notably higher. We found the knowledge acquired in this way insufficient and incomplete which was proved by numerous answers obtained later on. There is an insufficient knowledge on the methods of early detection, unrecognized or poorly recognized by 2790 women (80.3%), with no significant differences between urban and rural areas. Data on the idea concerning possibilities of developing CC was similar--2856 women (86.3% in urban, 83.4% in rural areas) hardly if ever think of the disease. Consequences are seen in the fact that in the last three years the women never underwent DE--66.8% in urban (1302 women) and 82.3%$ in rural area (1103 women), while the minimum of two or more examinations was carried out in only 17.3% of women from the city and 6.9% of women from the villages. Insufficient knowledge was also shown on the impact of risk factors for CC.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)