VIDEO: Addressing racial disparities in prostate cancer

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify cperla@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Great disparities in prostate cancer from the incidents, to treatment, and outcomes. Particularly in African-Americans, we know that there's a higher prevalence of prostate cancer in the population. They're about a two to three times higher chance of getting prostate cancer than Whites. We need to figure out how we're gonna screen these patients better. There is a greater hesitancy to screening. How do we get the message out to talk about the benefit of screening in this population?

We know that patients particularly African-American patients tend to present with more aggressive disease, more advanced disease. And so, how do we tailor the treatment in those patients to take that into account? We also know that African-Americans tend to be treated differently or prefer different treatments than whites for example. Studies continue to show that they are less likely to have surgery for their localized prostate cancer, more likely to get radiation, less likely to have definitive treatment for their prostate cancer. So we're continuing to understand why that is.

We recently published a paper in The Journal of Urology trying to identify potential causes for this. Using survey data, we found that there is an underlying medical mistrust in some of these communities, and we're trying to figure out how can we improve the relationship between providers and patients. One way to do deal with it, is to improve relationships, and also perhaps have an increased number of providers and increased diversity in the providers. So that patients can better relate to their providers, and hopefully have a better relationship, and therefore are more likely to agree with the recommendations given by the providers with respect to their treatment for prostate cancer.