Is It A Fact That Black Men At Greater Risk From Prostate Cancer Than White Men?
Statistics show that black men are more likely to die from prostate cancer than white men and most statisticians agree that the risk in the case of African Americans is in the region of two and a half times that of white men. But, are these figures misleading?
The answer to this question might come from a study conducted recently in North Carolina. The study looked at some 253 white men and 84 African Americans between the ages of 40 and 75 who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2001 and 2004.
The study looked at several factors including, symptoms, family history, income, employment, access to care, treatment, screening history, attitudes towards health care and health care providers, the existence of other medical conditions and whether the men had health insurance.
The study found that 55 percent of the African Americans earned under $40,000 annually compared to 23 percent for the white men. It also found that African Americans were more likely to be educated to a lower standard, to have blue-collar jobs, to have other accompanying medical conditions and to be unemployed through illness or disability.
The study further found that only 3 percent of white men did not have medical insurance, in comparison to 8 percent of African Americans and that just over 30 percent of white men has some type of supplemental Medicare coverage, in comparison to 17 percent of African Americans.
One especially interesting finding from the study was that both groups of men were well informed about both the risks of prostrate cancer and the requirement for treatment, but that the African Americans accepted more responsibility for their own health and were less likely to trust their doctors. In fact several of the African Americans stated they were mistrustful of their doctors and felt that any advice given was more likely to be based on the cost of treatment than patient needs.
When it came to screening, African Americans were less inclined to have regular check-ups, digital rectal examinations or prostate specific antigen (PSA) tests. The study also reported that African Americans were far more 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 that lies in the lack of early detection in the case of African Americans and that this arises to a significant degree from the fact that they do not have sound relationships with their physicians, have poor access to convenient and affordable health care and do not have adequate health insurance.
Quite clearly it is difficult to assign numbers to a study of this type and additional, and larger, studies have to be conducted to quantify the differenced between African Americans and white men. Nonetheless, it would seem that much of the difference does not stem from the fact that African Americans 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 closed then the statistics could well look very different.
