Race, Income, Marital Status Has No Impact On Prostate Cancer Outcome

A patient's income, martial status and race has absolutely no impact on their outcome following curative radiation therapy for the treatment of prostate cancer.

A study conducted at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit found that socioeconomic status factors had no impact on predicting the outcome of treatment. All patients did equally well, based on the known prognostic factors.

The study, presented this week at the American Society for Radiation Oncology meeting in Chicago is unique in that nearly 50 percent of patients in the analysis are African American.

Prostate cancer affects one in six men in the United States according to the American Association for Critical Illness Insurance and the majority of all prostate cancer are diagnosed in men older than 65.  Most individuals diagnosed with the illness will survive.  Only one in 35 will die of prostate cancer.   Radiation therapy involves administering high-energy X-rays to kill cancer cells. 

According to the study's lead researcher, prior studies on socioeconomic status and cancer outcomes done by other groups have had conflicting results.  One study, for example, suggested that African Americans with breast or colon cancer do much worse than white patients because they receive care at hospitals with less expertise. 

Another study the medical experts noted show that men with prostate cancer who are married have better outcomes than those who are unmarried or without a partner. And yet other studies suggested that hospitals with large minority patient populations have higher mortality for cancer.

A shortcoming of many of the studies is the fact that they include a relatively small percentage of African American patients.  By comparison, almost half of the Ford study group was African American, which allowed researchers to undertake a more accurate assessment of how socioeconomic status affects prostate cancer outcomes.

The study included 788 Henry Ford Hospital patients with localized prostate cancer who were treated with external beam radiation therapy. Among those in the study, 48.5 percent were African American with a median household income $36,917, and 46 percent were white with a median household income of $60,190. The patients' ages ranged from 44 to 90.

While there was a large difference in median household income among African Americans and whites, none of the socioeconomic factors examined predicted for patient outcome. Only known disease risk factors determined overall survival or biochemical (PSA) control rates.