Introduction: Testicular cancer is the most common type of cancer in young men aged under 35 years. According to statistics, the number of new cases of testicular cancer will increase in the future. Early detection of testicular cancer is crucial for survival and successful treatment of the disease. Testicular self-examination is a simple procedure that men can perform on their own at home without any medical devices and it enables the detection of any changes in the testicles on time. Through health education, nurses can influence young men's awareness of testicular cancer and encourage them to perform testicular self-examination regularly. Purpose: The bachelor’s thesis aims to determine the awareness of testicular cancer and testicular self-examination in young males in the age group of 15 to 35 and to determine the effectiveness of different health educational practices for testicular self-examination. Methods: A review of Slovenian and foreign literature was performed by searching for scientific and academic articles on the website Digitalna knjižnica Univerze v Ljubljani and in the international databases CINAHL with Full Text, Cochrane Library, Springerlink, PubMed, and ScienceDirect. We included 20 original scientific articles in the literature review. Results: With review and analysis of the literature we find out that awareness of testicular cancer and testicular self-examination among young men is low, the proportion of young males self-examining their testicles is also low. According to research, health education raises young men's awareness of testicular cancer and encourages them to self-examine their testicles regularly. The most effective health education practices for testicular self-examination are a demonstrating video, an educational workshop with the participation of young males who overcame testicular cancer, and a practical demonstration on testicular self-examination on the educational testicle model. Discussion and conclusion: With proper health educational practices we can raise young men's awareness of testicular cancer and inform young males about the regular procedure of testicular self-examination and how important it is for early detection of testicular cancer. Health education is most effective during the school period because then, we can reach a large number of young men who are easier to influence. After all, they still form their behavioral patterns. There are other health educational practices yet to be explored, especially the use of modern information communication technology which is very accessible to the young population.
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