As you go, spread the word: spiritually based breast cancer education for African American women.

INTRODUCTION: In partnership with an African American church, we developed an educational booklet on breast cancer early detection from within a spiritual framework. This booklet included religious themes and biblical scripture supporting the early detection message, for women ages 40 and over to have regular mammograms.

METHODS: The spiritually based booklet was compared against a demographically targeted booklet (for African American women, but with no spiritual or religious content) for communication effectiveness. One hundred and eight African American women were randomly assigned to read one of the booklets and complete a series of questionnaires about the booklet.

RESULTS: Both those in the spiritually based and the secular groups reported significant increases in knowledge about breast cancer treatment and decrease in perceived barriers to mammography. Those in the spiritually based group additionally increased knowledge about mammograms.

CONCLUSIONS: This small study suggests that spiritually based approaches may be more effective than secular based. Our future studies will explore these and other spiritually based interventions in larger sample sizes of patients.