Although black men in the United States are more likely than white men to be diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and have a two-fold greater risk of dying from it, they are significantly less likely to be screened for prostate cancer, according to a Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital study.
In a study involving more than 67,000 men age 65 years and older, the researchers found that blacks were 35 percent less likely than whites to undergo prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing. The findings will be published in the Sept. 27 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
“The level of racial disparity in the use of PSA screening is quite unsettling,” says Timothy Gilligan, MD, a genitourinary oncologist at Dana-Farber and the paper’s lead author. “While some physicians question the effectiveness of PSA as a screening test, there is no reason its availability should differ according to a man’s race. Indeed, because blacks are at higher risk of dying from prostate cancer, they stand to benefit the most from screening.”
Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in men in the United States. The American Cancer Society estimates that nearly 30,000 men will die from the disease this year and that 230,000 cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed. While the prostate cancer mortality rate for blacks has declined a little during the past decade, it is still more than double the rate for other races and ethnicities. Prostate cancer also tends to be detected in blacks at a younger age and at a more advanced stage than in whites.