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

Statistics show that African American men are at more risk of dying from prostate cancer than white men and most statisticians agree that the risk for black men is in the region of two and a half times that of white Americans. Howver, are these statistics misleading?

The answer may come from a study carried out recently in North Carolina. The study involved some 253 white men and 84 African Americans aged between 40 and 75 who were diagnosed with prostate cancer between 2001 and 2004.

The study considered several factors including, income, family history, symptoms, access to care, attitudes towards health care and health care providers, the existence of other medical conditions, employment, treatment, screening history and whether or not the men had health insurance.

The study discovered that 55 percent of the African Americans earned less than $40,000 a year in comparison to to 23 percent for white men. The study also showed that African Americans were more likely to be less well educated, to have a blue-collar job, to have co-existing medical conditions and to be unemployed because of illness or disability.

The study further showed 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 especially interesting finding from the study was the fact that both groups of men were well informed about the risks of prostrate cancer and the need for treatment, although the African Americans accepted more responsibility for their own health and were less likely to trust their doctors. Indeed a number of the African Americans said that they were mistrustful of their doctors and considered 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, African Americans were less inclined 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 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 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 affordable and convenient care and do not carry adequate health insurance.

Obviously it is not easy to put numbers to a study of this type and additional, and bigger, studies should to be carried out to quantify the differenced between black men and white Americans. Nevertheless, it would appear that much of the difference does not lie in the fact that black men are more likely to develop prostate cancer but lies in the fact that they are more likely to die as a result of the disease because of its late detection.

If the gap between black men and white men as far as the provision of healthcare were narrowed then the statistics could well look very different.

Article Source: http://www.bylamoarticles.com

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

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