Compared with white men, African-American men may be at increased risk of their prostate cancer returning after they have undergone removal of the prostate gland, especially if they had a high-risk form of the disease.
In their study presented data on over 1,400 patients who underwent removal of their prostate.
Prostate cancer returned in about one in five of the patients, and researchers found that ethnicity made a difference in whether or not a patient's cancer returned. According to the researchers, African Americans were 50% more likely than the other study participants to get prostate cancer again.
Ethnicity was most important for high-risk patients. They defined high risk as those patients with very high (more than 20 ng/mL) prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels and aggressive tumors.
When the investigators looked at a group of 975 patients for whom they also had information about income and education, ethnicity was no longer a predictor of disease recurrence.
American Urological Association's Annual Meeting May 28, 2002
This is not rocket science, but nearly ALL health care professionals have missed it.
We are all designed to obtain vitamin D from the sun, but the high concentration of melanin in the skin of most African Americans essentially blocks the majority of UV-B that converts cholesterol into vitamin D. African Americans who want to live a healthy life in the United States need to pay careful attention to one simple nutrient, vitamin D.
Vitamin D is so crucial in prostate cancer prevention that there are a number of ongoing studies actually investigating the use of vitamin D analogs for the treatment of advanced metastatic prostate cancer.
It is vital that vitamin D levels be optimized in all African Americans. I wrote an extensive article on how this is done earlier this year.
While the above study discusses prostate cancer, the virtual identical situation exists with African American women and their risk of breast cancer.
Here are some other nutrients that are likely to benefit prostate cancer, which is the number one cancer in men.