Paper short abstract:

The knowledge of reproductive health among the old women living in the rural areas of West China is very scarce.

Paper long abstract:

The Aging of Population in China has become a currently notable issue, especially for the old women. Most of those old women are the susceptible population of some kinds of reproductive related diseases after menopause, whereas their knowledge of reproductive health is hypothesized to be very scarce, especially for those living in the rural areas of West China. Though some previous studies have been done to explore the such situation among the old women in Chinese west rural areas, the related evidence is still scarce.

An epidemiological study was conducted for 979 eligible Chinese old women aged 60-75 years old from Sichuan Province in 2010. Descriptive statistic method was used to ferret out the situation of their knowledge about reproductive health .

According to our results, the participants in this study were lack of the knowledge of reproductive health. More than 51% of them were not awared of the relationship between healthy behaviours and the incidences of the related diseases. More then 61% of them had not correct knowledge about Sexually Transmitted Diseases(STDs),such as HIV/AIDS. Even just about the percentages of those who knew the names of diseases were still very low. For some related malignant tumors, about 34.6% and 29.3% of them heard about cervical cancer and endometrium cancer, respectively. Similar situation was found about non-malignant diseases.

To promote the reproductive health of the old women in Chinese west rural areas, there's still a long way to go. Further studies should be done to deal with the problems.