In a study published in JAMA Network Open, a team of researchers analyzed the geographic distribution of prostate cancer cases by race. They note that it has been well established that there are racial disparities in prostate cancer mortality rates. However, how these disparities are distributed geographically is not as well understood.
The cohort of men used for this study consisted of 229,771 individuals, of which 77.6% were white, 15.2% were Black, and 7.2% were of other or unknown race. The mean age at diagnosis was 64.9 years. There were 4,773 deaths reported among the white men in the study and 1,250 reported among the Black men.
It was found that the overall mortality rate was higher among Black men. Black men had worse prostate cancer-specific survival in 4 areas of the 17 geographic registries studied. The area with the greatest survival disparity was Atlanta, Georgia.
The researchers concluded that an understanding of where prostate cancer disparities are concentrated could help determine where targeted efforts at decreasing these disparities should be focused. Such a targeted effort could significantly reduce prostate cancer disparities at a national level [1].
Source:
[1] Fletcher, S. A., Marchese, M., Cole, A. P., Mahal, B. A., Friedlander, D. F., Krimphove, M., Kilbridge, K. L., Lipsitz, S. R., Nguyen, P. L., Choueiri, T. K., Kibel, A. S., & Trinh, Q. D. (2020). Geographic Distribution of Racial Differences in Prostate Cancer Mortality. JAMA Network Open, 3(3), e201839. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.1839