THURSDAY, Oct. 12, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Men of all races and ethnic groups who’ve prostate cancer fare equally well when access to care is equivalent, a brand new study finds.

The disparity in outcomes from prostate cancer between Black, Hispanic and white men disappears when treatment and care are the identical, because it is in U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VA) hospitals. In reality, Black and Hispanic men, on average fared higher than white men, researchers report.

“Traditionally, the outcomes for Black and Hispanic patients, a minimum of in non-equal access health care settings, have been poor,” said lead researcher Kelli Rasmussen, an epidemiologist on the University of Utah School of Medicine.

“There’s a myriad of reasons, certainly one of which we all know is that prostate cancer often presents in Black patients at an earlier age,” she said. “They sometimes have poor survival outcomes.”

However the VA is a novel situation where veterans receive the identical care no matter their income, Rasmussen said. “That signifies that these men don’t face a few of the challenges that individuals who should not veterans often face with regard to health care, like inadequate insurance or poor access to care within the private sector,” she said.

Rasmussen believes that when you take a look at other medical conditions, the disparity in outcomes between white and minority patients would also disappear.

“These patient populations have plenty of disparities in relation to accessing the health care system,” she said. “We don’t really know at this point which diseases could be affected, but given our findings, we definitively think that might be the case.”

“When Black and Hispanic men have access to equal health care, they’ve improved outcomes,” Rasmussen added.

For the study, Rasmussen and her colleagues collected data on nearly 13,000 men diagnosed with prostate cancer within the VA health care system from January 2006 to December 2020. These cancers developed right into a deadly variety of cancer called non-metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.

The researchers found that the median time to either the spread of cancer or death was 6 years for Black and Hispanic patients and 4 years for white and other patients.

The median unadjusted overall survival was just over 6 years amongst all patients, 8 years for Black patients, 8 1/2 years for Hispanic patients, 5 1/2 years for white patients and 4 1/2 years for other patients, the researchers noted.

The report was published online Oct. 11 within the journal JAMA Network Open.

Why Black and Hispanic men do higher than white men isn’t clear, Rasmussen said. “Here, we’re seeing not only a couple of months of higher survival, but we’re actually seeing years.”

It’s possible that men within the VA system are being diagnosed earlier, which can account for higher survival, Rasmussen speculated.

A cancer expert not involved with the study stressed the importance of accessing care.

“There’s absolute confidence that equal access is vital,” said Dr. Anthony D’Amico, chief of the Division of Genitourinary Radiation Oncology on the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“For those who marginalize any person by not giving them access to health care, then delay in diagnosis happens with cancer, with diabetes, with heart disease. So, equal access is actually very necessary,” he said.

D’Amico’s one quibble with the study is that he doesn’t consider the researchers have shown that given equal access to care, Black and Hispanic patients do higher than white patients.

“By way of this specific paper, they haven’t quite proven the purpose only because an important prognostic factor is missing within the model, namely Gleason scores [prostate cancer grades based on tumor cells seen in biopsy] which are predictive of outcomes, but having said that, I consider it’s probably true,” he said.

More information

For more on prostate cancer, see the American Cancer Society.

SOURCES: Kelli Rasmussen, MS, epidemiologist, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City; Anthony D’Amico, MD, chief, Division of Genitourinary Radiation Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston; JAMA Network Open, Oct. 11, 2023, online