Introduction. A sample of 95 Polish postmenopausal women after mastectomy were studied with the objective of
describing Health Behaviour Indicators (HBIs) among the participants. The notion of health, the subjective evaluation of
the participants’ health condition and their lifestyle before cancer diagnosis and at present wewre examined.
Materials and method. Two data collection instruments were used: a questionnaire developed by the research team, and
the Health Behaviour Inventory (HBI) – a standardised questionnaire developed by Juczyński. The HBIs four main dimensions:
proper nutritional habits (PNH), preventive behaviours (PB), health practices (HPs), and positive mental attitude (PMA) were
examined. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed with the post-hoc test (multiple comparisons conducted
Turkey’s test).
Results. Well-being was the most often indicated description of the health notions of the women surveyed. The majority
of women (75; 78.9%) believed that they led a healthy lifestyle. The overall HBI, on average, was 85.7 out of 120. Specifically,
HPs was the highest health behaviour enacted (3.75 Standard Deviation [SD] 1.59), followed by PB (3.66; 0.69 SD). In the
bivariate analysis, married (87.2; 12.7 SD) and widowed (89.8; 7.9 SD) women reported higher scores than those who were
unmarried (76.7; 14.6 SD) and divorced (83.6; 12.5 SD) (p < 0.05).
Conclusions. HBI of postmenopausal women after mastectomy is high, which may suggest that mastectomy at the
postmenopausal state enforces pro-healthy HBs.
