Is It True That Black Men At Higher Risk From Getting Prostate Cancer Than White Men?

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Statistics show that African American men are at greater risk of dying from prostate cancer than white men and the majority of statisticians agree that the risk for black men is around about two and a half times that of white men. Howver, are these figures misleading?

The answer to this question could come from a study carried out not long ago in North Carolina. The study looked at a group of 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, the existence of other medical conditions, screening history, family history, access to care, income, treatment, symptoms, employment, attitudes towards health care and health care providers and whether the men had health insurance.

The study found that 55 percent of the African Americans earned less than $40,000 annually compared to 23 percent for the white men. The study also found that African Americans were more likely to be educated to a lower standard, to have blue-collar jobs, to have co-existing medical conditions and to be unemployed because of disability or illness.

The study further found that just 3 percent of white men had no medical insurance at all, compared to 8 percent of African Americans and that just over 30 percent of white men has some type of supplemental Medicare coverage, compared to 17 percent of African Americans.

One particularly interesting finding was that both groups of men were equally well informed about both the risks of prostrate cancer and the need for treatment, although the African Americans accepted greater responsibility for their own health and were less likely to trust their doctors. In fact several of the African Americans stated they were wary of their doctors and believed that any advice given was more likely to be influenced by the cost of treatment than patient needs.

When it came to screening, African Americans were less likely 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 African Americans were far more likely to have had to ask for 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 African Americans and that this arises to a large degree from the fact that they do not have well established relationships with their physicians, have poor access to convenient and affordable health care and do not carry adequate health insurance.

Quite clearly it is difficult to put numbers to a study of this type and additional, and bigger, studies need to be carried out to quantify the differenced between black men and white men. Nonetheless, it seems 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 from the disease because of its late detection.

If the gap between the two groups in terms of the provision of healthcare were narrowed the figures might well look quite different.

Article Source: http://depositarticles.com/

ProstateProblemCenter.com provides information on prostate cancer from understanding prostate cancer symptoms to the therapeutic use of prostate milking

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