Statistics show that black men are more likely to die from prostate cancer than white men and the majority of statisticians agree that the risk in the case of African Americans is around about two and a half times that of white Americans. But, are these statistics misleading?
The answer to this question might be found in a study conducted not long ago in North Carolina. The study looked at a group of 253 white men and 84 black men between the ages of 40 and 75 who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2001 and 2004.
The study considered several factors including, income, access to care, employment, the existence of other medical conditions, attitudes towards health care and health care providers, symptoms, screening history, treatment, family history and whether the men had health insurance.
The study found that 55 percent of the black men earned less than $40,000 a year in comparison to to 23 percent for white men. It also showed that black men were more likely to be educated to a lower standard, to have a blue-collar job, to have co-existing medical problems and to be unemployed as a result of disability or illness.
The study further showed that only 3 percent of white men had no medical insurance at all, in comparison to 8 percent of black men and that just over 30 percent of white men has some type of supplemental Medicare coverage, in comparison to 17 percent of black men.
One especially interesting finding from the study was that both groups were equally well informed about both the risks of prostrate cancer and the need for treatment, although the black men accepted greater responsibility for their own health and were not as likely to trust their doctors. In fact several of the black men stated that they were distrustful 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 the case of black men and that this arises to a significant degree from the fact that they do not have well established relationships with their physicians, have poor access to affordable and convenient care and do not have adequate health insurance.
Clearly it is difficult to assign numbers to a study of this nature and additional, and more extensive, studies need to be conducted to quantify the differenced between African Americans and white Americans. Nonetheless, it seems that much of the difference does not stem from the fact that African Americans are more likely to develop prostate cancer but lies in the fact that they are more likely to die from the disease because of its was detected late.
If the gap between African Americans and white men in terms of the provision of healthcare were closed then the statistics might well look very different.
Author Resource:-
ProstateProblemCenter.com provides information on prostate cancer from understanding prostate cancer symptoms to the therapeutic use of prostate milking
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