The answer to this question may come from a study carried out recently in North Carolina. The study involved some 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, employment, treatment, screening history, symptoms, access to care, the existence of other medical conditions, attitudes towards health care and health care providers, family history and whether the men had health insurance.
The study found that 55 percent of the black men earned under $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 co-existing medical conditions and to be unemployed through disability or illness.
In addition the study found that just 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 particularly interesting finding was that both groups were equally well informed about the risks of prostrate cancer and the need for treatment, although the black men accepted more responsibility for their own health and were less likely to trust their doctors. Indeed several of the black men said they were mistrustful of their doctors and considered 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 had to ask for a PSA test than white men.
The study makes it clear 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 convenient and affordable care and do not have adequate health insurance.
Quite clearly it is not easy to put numbers to a study of this type and additional, and more extensive, studies should to be carried out to quantify the differenced between black men and white Americans. Nonetheless, it would seem 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 from the disease because of its late detection.
If the gap between the two groups in terms of the provision of healthcare were narrowed the statistics might well look quite different.
Article Source: http://www.articlesworldonline.com
