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  Is It True That African American Men At More Risk From Prostate Cancer Than White Men?Figures 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 in the case of African Americans is approximately two and a half times that of white men. But, is this data misleading?The answer could 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 aged between 40 and 75 who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2001 and 2004. The study considered a number of factors including, symptoms, access to care, screening history, employment, income, attitudes towards health care and health care providers, family history, the existence of other medical conditions, treatment 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 found that black men were more likely to be educated to a lower standard, to have blue-collar jobs, to have other accompanying medical problems and to be unemployed because of disability or illness. In addition 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 form 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, although the black men took greater responsibility for their own health and were less likely to trust their doctors. In fact many of the black men stated they were mistrustful of their doctors and felt that any advice given was more likely to be influenced by the cost of treatment than it was to be based upon 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. The study also reported that black men were more than twice as 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 which 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 affordable and convenient health care and do not hold adequate health insurance. Obviously it is not easy to assign numbers to a study of this type and further, and more extensive, studies should to be conducted to quantify the differenced between African Americans and white men. Nonetheless, 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 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 quite different. Free Article Source: http://www.za77.org About The Author: ProstateProblemCenter.com provides information on prostate cancer from understanding prostate cancer symptoms to the therapeutic use of prostate milking |