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

Articles » Disease-&-Illness » Prostate-Cancer >> View Article

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

By: Donald Saunders

Figures 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, is this data misleading?

The answer to this question could come from a study conducted not long ago in North Carolina. The study looked at some 253 white men and 84 black men aged between 40 and 75 who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2001 and 2004.

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

The study discovered that 55 percent of the black men earned under $40,000 a year in comparison to to 23 percent for white men. The study also found that black men were more likely to be educated to a lower standard, to have a blue-collar job, to have other accompanying medical problems and to be unemployed because of disability or illness.

Additionally, the study found 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 especially interesting finding was that both groups were equally well informed about both the risks of prostrate cancer and the need for treatment, but that the black men took greater responsibility for their own health and were less likely to trust their doctors. In fact several of the black men said they were wary of their doctors and felt that the advice they were giving was more likely to be based on the cost of treatment than 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 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 large degree from the fact that they do not have well established relationships with their doctors, have poor access to convenient and affordable care and do not carry adequate health insurance.

Obviously it is not easy to put numbers to a study of this nature and additional, and more extensive, studies must to be conducted to quantify the differenced between African Americans and white men. Nevertheless, it would appear that much of the difference does not lie in the fact that African Americans 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 late detection.

If the gap between African Americans and white men as far as the provision of healthcare were narrowed the statistics could well look quite different.

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

Article Source: www.find-an-article.com/index.php?page=author&author_name=Donald Saunders

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