Is It The Case That African American Men At Greater Risk From Getting Prostate Cancer Than White Men

Figures show that African American men are at greater risk of dying from prostate cancer than white men and most statisticians are in agreement that the risk for black men is about two and a half times that of white Americans. But, are these statistics misleading?

The answer might be found in a study conducted not long ago in North Carolina. The study involved a group of 253 white men and 84 black men between the ages of 40 and 75 who were diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2001 and 2004.

The study examined a number of factors including treatment, income, employment, family history, the existence of other medical conditions, symptoms, attitudes towards health care and health care providers, screening history, access to care and whether or not the men had health insurance.

The study discovered that 55 percent of the black men earned less than $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 blue-collar jobs, to have other accompanying medical conditions and to be unemployed as a result of disability or illness.

In addition the study showed that only 3 percent of white men had no medical insurance at all, compared to 8 percent of black men and that just over 30 percent of white men has some type of supplemental Medicare coverage, compared to 17 percent of black men.

One particularly interesting finding was the fact that both groups of men were equally well informed about both the risks of prostrate cancer and the requirement for treatment, although the black men took greater responsibility for their own health and were less likely to trust their doctors. Indeed a number of the black men stated they were wary of their doctors and believed that the advice they were giving was more likely to be influenced by the cost of treatment than patient needs.

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

The study makes it clear that there is a marked different between the two groups that lies in the lack of early detection in black men and that this arises to a significant degree from the fact that they do not have established relationships with their doctors, have poor access to affordable and convenient health care and do not have adequate health insurance.

Clearly it is not easy to assign numbers to a study of this type and further, and bigger, studies must to be conducted to quantify the differences between black men and white Americans. Nonetheless, it seems that much of the difference does not stem from the fact that black men are more likely to develop prostate cancer but stems from the fact that they are more likely to die from the disease because of its was detected late.

If the gap between the two groups in terms of the provision of healthcare were narrowed the statistics could well look very different.

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