TUESDAY, April 17 (HealthDay News) -- In men who undergo surgery for prostate cancer, blacks are more likely than whites to experience disease recurrence, and the racial disparity is widest among those who undergo surgery at high-volume hospitals, according to research presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Los Angeles.
Kyna Gooden, Ph.D., of Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., and colleagues analyzed Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End-Results Medicare data on 962 black and 7,387 white patients who were diagnosed between 1993 and 1999 and received surgery within six months of diagnosis.
The researchers found that disease recurrence was more common among black men than white men (hazard ratio, 1.32). They also found that this racial disparity was greater when surgery was performed at high-volume hospitals (HR, 1.66) that at medium-volume or low-volume hospitals (HR, 1.12 and 1.24, respectively).
"We expected that if everyone was treated by similarly experienced doctors or hospitals, they would have had comparable outcomes," Gooden said in a statement. "But that wasn't the case. These results may have less to do with access to clinical care but more to do with lifestyle factors and the physical and genetic characteristics of the tumor itself."
Abstract
