Research Article Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use among Norwegian Cancer Survivors: Gender-Specific Prevalence and Associations for Use

Copyright © 2013 Agnete E. Kristoffersen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The associations for CAM use are only occasionally differentiated by gender in populations where both male and female cancer survivors occur.The aim of this study is to describe the prevalence of CAM use in individuals with a previous cancer diagnosis and to investigate gender differences regard to factors associated with use. A total of 12982 men and women filled in a questionnaire with questions about life style and health issues. Eight hundred of those had a previous cancer diagnosis of whom 630 answered three questions concerning CAM use in the last 12 months. A total of 33.8 % of all cancer survivors reported CAM use, 39.4 % of the women and 27.9 % of the men