Is It A Fact That Black Men At More Risk From Prostate Cancer Than White Men?

Many of us are familiar with differences in health based upon ethnicity but could it really be the case that this applies to prostate cancer?

Data shows that African American men are more likely to die from prostate cancer than white men and most statisticians are in agreement that the risk in the case of black men is around about two and a half times that of white Americans. But, are these statistics misleading?

The answer might come from a study carried out recently in North Carolina. The study involved a group of 253 white men and 84 black men aged between 40 and 75 who were diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2001 and 2004.

The study considered a number of factors including, treatment, income, family history, symptoms, screening history, the existence of other medical conditions, employment, access to care, attitudes towards health care and health care providers and whether the men had health insurance.

The study discovered that 55 percent of the black men earned under $40,000 annually compared to 23 percent for white men. It also showed that black men were more likely to be less well educated, to have a blue-collar job, to have co-existing medical conditions and to be unemployed because of illness or disability.

The study further showed that just 3 percent of white men did not have medical insurance, compared to 8 percent of black men and that just over 30 percent of white men has some form of supplemental Medicare coverage, compared to 17 percent of black men.

One particularly interesting finding was that both groups were well informed about both the risks of prostrate cancer and the requirement for treatment, although the black men accepted greater responsibility for their own health and were less likely to trust their doctors. In fact a number of the black men stated that they were mistrustful of their doctors and believed that any advice given was more likely to be influenced by the cost of treatment than it was to be based upon patient needs.

On the important question of screening, black men were less likely to have regular check-ups, digital rectal examinations or prostate specific antigen (PSA) tests. The study also reported that black men were more than twice as likely to have to ask for a PSA test than white men.

It is clear from this study that there is a marked different between the two groups which lies in the lack of early detection in black men and that this arises to a large degree from the fact that they do not have sound relationships with their physicians, have poor access to affordable and convenient health care and do not carry adequate health insurance.

Clearly it is not easy to put numbers to a study of this type and additional, and larger, studies will have to be carried out to quantify the differenced between black men and white Americans. Nonetheless, it would appear that much of the difference does not lie in the fact that black men are more likely to develop prostate cancer but stems from the fact that they are more likely to die as a result of the disease because of its was detected late.

If the gap between the two groups as far as the provision of healthcare were narrowed then the figures could well look very different.

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