Exploring post mastectomy patients’ experience on handmade knitted breast prosthesis, a project lead by the breast nurse specialist

Abstract

Objective: Not all post mastectomy patients are eligible for immediate or late breast reconstruction. Therefore, an appropriate external breast prothesis (EBP) after mastectomy can inspire patient’s copying mechanism, self-confident and improve body image. This study aims to highlight the perceived comfort, confidence, satisfaction of post mastectomy women with the use of knitted EBP.
Methods: A cross-sectional study design was implemented, and 51 participants completed an electronic questionnaire survey. The survey consisted of 26 close-ended questions related to body image satisfaction, confidence, satisfaction with the knitted EBP.
Results: Interestingly, almost more than half of the participants reported dissatisfaction with their physical appearance following mastectomy if they do not wear the EBP and they were highly confident after wearing the EBP (76%) and (86%) respectively. Moreover, almost all participants reported their satisfaction regarding the EBP in terms of weight and stated that it is light and can be worn with almost all types of clothes (94%) and (70%), respectively.
Conclusions: Our study shows that the majority of post mastectomy women had grateful experience with the knitted EBP and reported better self-confidence after wearing the breast prosthesis. However, there is no effect of EBP on young patient’s decision to have breast reconstruction in future.

Keywords

Post-mastectomy / External breast prosthesis / Breast cancer

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank all participating women with breast cancer for their contributions to the study.

AUTHORS CONTRIBUTIONS

Dr. J. Blake Smith and Emily Weatherford were responsible for the design and revising of the manuscript. Dr. Ken Tillman was responsible for editing and revising. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

FUNDING

No funding.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST DISCLOSURE

The authors declare that there are no potential conflicts of interest.

INFORMED CONSENT

Not applicable.

ETHICS APPROVAL

The Publication Ethics Committee of the Sciedu Press. The journal’s policies adhere to the Core Practices established by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

PROVENANCE AND PEER REVIEW

Not commissioned; externally double-blind peer reviewed.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

DATA SHARING STATEMENT

No additional data are available.

OPEN ACCESS

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

COPYRIGHTS

Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.

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