OBJECTIVES: this work aimed at studying the experience of Japanese women and Brazilian women from Japanese descent submited theirselves to cervical cancer screening. METHODS: an exploratory quantitative study, was performed intending to know women's characteristics typical of their nationality and their attitude towards the Papanicolaou smear. The number of participants was 149 women, 79 Japanese and 70 Brazilian. RESULTS: the main results showed that the large majority of women (82.6%) submitted themselves to the cervical cancer screening. The Brazilian women (92.9%) showed a higher participation percentage than the Japanese (73.4%) women. The majority of Brazilian women (64.6%) were encouraged by their gynecologist to run the Papanicolaou smear, whereas 26.2% of Japanese women were encouraged by prevention campaigns. Japanese women (53.6%) had greater difficulty in submitting to the test than the Brazilian group (10.8%). The greatest difficulty of the Japanese women (58,7%) was their sense of "shame" to run the Papanicolaou smear. CONCLUSIONS: the reasons presented by the women for not running the Papanicolaou Test points out to many important issues which need to be reconsidered by health professionals working with women's health.
Cervix neoplasms; Vaginal smears; Women's health
