Black men have double the risk of being diagnosed & dying from Prostate Cancer
UK scientists found that black men in England have double the risk of being both diagnosed with, and dying from Prostate Cancer some point in their lives compared with white men.
“This new information will be incredibly valuable in helping men to understand their own prostate cancer risk” – Casey Dunlop, Cancer Research UK
The study found that Asian men in England have nearly half the chance of being diagnosed with and dying from the disease.
According to Cancer Research UK, this is the first time scientists have calculated both the risk of developing the disease and dying from it across different ethnic groups in England.
“At the moment we don’t know the reasons behind these differences. More research is needed to understand if this pattern might be due to finding more cancers, or more aggressive cancers, in different ethnic groups,” said Casey Dunlop, health information officer at the charity.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK, with around 42,000 diagnosed each year.
Prostate Cancer UK, which carried out the research along with Public Health England, said the findings could help individuals better understand their risk of developing the disease. This study looked at incidence and mortality data for England from 2008-2010 across every major ethnic group.
The dataset included more than 25 million men, with over 100,000 prostate cancer diagnoses and greater than 26,000 deaths from the disease.
This allowed the team to estimate the lifetime risk of a man being diagnosed with prostate cancer. This was around one in eight (13.3 per cent) for white men, one in four (29.3 per cent) for black men (including black African, black Caribbean and other black) and one in 13 (7.9 per cent) for Asian men (including Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other Asian).
