Black Men Face Highest Incidence of Prostate Cancer in the U.K.

THURSDAY, March 14, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- Among primary care patients in the United Kingdom, the incidence of prostate cancer with an elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) result is higher among Black men than White or Asian men, according to a study published online March 1 in BMC Medicine.

Liz Down, from University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, and colleagues assessed the incidence of prostate cancer following a raised PSA test (2010 to 2017) among different ethnic groups using data from 730,515 men (aged 40 years and older) seen at general practices in England contributing to the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum dataset. 

The researchers found that Black men and men with mixed ethnicity had higher PSA values, particularly those older than 60 years. Using age-specific thresholds, in the year following a raised PSA result, Black men had the highest prostate cancer incidence (24.7 percent), Asian men had the lowest (13.4 percent), and the incidence for White men was 19.8 percent. For all groups, the peak incidence of prostate cancer was in men aged 70 to 79 years. For prostate cancer diagnosed at an advanced stage, incidence was similar between Black and White men.

"When designing screening programs or advice for clinicians on opportunistic screening, it may be necessary to consider the possibility that the identified differences in PSA distribution and prostate cancer incidence in the different ethnic groups may lead to differential under- or over-diagnosis in certain groups," the authors write.

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