*While prostate cancer is a disease only contracted by men, it is the most common cancer diagnosed among Black Men, EURweb previously reported. Moreover, according to ZeroCancer.org, Black men are 1.8 times more likely to be diagnosed with—and 2.2 times more likely to die from—prostate cancer than white men.
In early prostate diagnosis, Black men are said to be better with radiotherapy than white men, as reported by MedPage Today.
According to the outlet, Amar Kishan, MD, of the University of California Los Angeles, and colleagues noted in JAMA Network Op that race-specific differences in response to initial medical treatment in early prostate cancer detection remain unknown.
READ MORE: The Intersection of Prostate Cancer, Black Men, Family Medical Secrets & More On ‘Auto Trends’
Here’s more from the MedPage Today report:
There were no significant differences, however, in time to all-cause mortality, time to other-cause mortality, and distant metastases or death between Black and white men. These results were “novel and unexpected” and “provide high-level evidence to question the belief that prostate cancer among Black men necessarily portends a worse prognosis compared with white men,” Kishan and colleagues wrote. “This belief may be a factor in differences in the approach to cancer therapy, thereby leading to the use of more aggressive treatments than might be necessary, which carry greater risks of decreasing the quality of life and distracting attention from other important factors associated with outcome and sources of disparity, such as access to care.”
Per the report, Bogdana Schmidt, MD, MPH, and Neeraj Agarwal, MD, of the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, noted in accompanying commentary that clinical trial enrollment “may hold the key to these findings.”
“We have seen that Black men who receive state-of-the-art care through clinical trials or have access to high-volume centers do not experience the adverse outcomes we know Black men do on the population level,” they wrote.
Health officials say more Black men are needed in clinical trials, along with more research into “tumor-specific genomic factors, treatment-specific response factors, and pharmacologic response differences,” in order to “unequivocally improve prostate cancer care for Black men,” they added.
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