African-American men are 2.5 times more likely to die from prostate cancer than men of other races. Please join MOCHA in taking action to eliminate this cancer health disparity.
MOCHA has been doing prostate cancer community education and outreach since 2012, with funding from the state Department of Public Health and technical support from the non-profit AdMeTech Foundation based in Boston. (AdMeTech stands for Advanced Medical Technologies. They are the leaders in prostate cancer research, awareness, advocacy and medical education, including sponsoring the global medical conference on the most recent advances in screening, diagnosis and treatment every year.) The following information is provided by AdMeTech’s Research Advisory Panel.
Prostate Cancer Health Disparity. With new advances in science and medical technologies, we can eliminate the prostate cancer health disparity. (A “disparity” is any difference in the rate at which people get sick and die, often due to social conditions, such as poverty and racism.) For men at risk, early screening with new and more accurate tests will save lives and prevent unnecessary pain and suffering.
Are you at risk? Most men do not get prostate cancer. But if you have risk factors for prostate cancer, you should see your doctor and get tested. (A “risk factor” is anything that makes it more likely that you will come down with an illness or disease. For example, smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer and obesity is a risk factor for diabetes.) The most important risk factor for prostate cancer is family history – if your father, uncle or brother has been diagnosed or died from prostate cancer, you are at higher risk. If a male relative has had prostate cancer, you need to get tested when you turn age 45, or as soon as possible if you are older than 45. Other major risk factors include age (over 50 years) and race (African-American). Two-step screening and testing. Screening tests have become much better, more accurate with new advances in medical equipment. If you are at risk, the first screening is a blood test called prostate-specific antigen (or PSA). PSA is something your body produces if it thinks you have prostate cancer. For most men, the test results will show that you do not have prostate cancer and you do not need to do anything more than come back in two years and get tested again. For a small number of men, the PSA test results will show that you need further testing, specifically, with a magnetic resonance imagery (MRI) machine (like an X-ray). The MRI is safe and highly accurate. If your PSA score is high, the MRI test will show whether you have prostate cancer or not. If you do and it is treated early, with proper treatment and care, you will be fine.
Why the second test is important. Up until several years ago, the only tests that doctors had to diagnose prostate cancer was the PSA test and the digital rectal exam (DRE). Neither test is very accurate; there are much better tests available now. With the PSA test, if your score is very high or very low, it is clear what you need to do. However, as often as not, the results fall somewhere in-between, and then, doctors recommended something called “shared decision-making,” which simply means that the doctor explains the pros and the cons, and then asks you what you want to do – to treat it or not. With the digital rectal exam, the doctor sticks his finger where the sun don’t shine to see if he can feel a cancer tumor or lump. If the doctor felt a hard lump, it was a strong sign that you may have prostate cancer. But, unfortunately, when poking his finger around down there, the doctor can touch and feel only part of the prostate gland, so you could have a big cancer growth and he would not even be able to feel it. These days, the DRE is generally not recommended. Now, if you are at risk, and if you have a high PSA score, then go get a MRI to find out for sure if you have prostate cancer and need to get treatment.
Can screening be bad? Before developing the new MRI tests, the results of the PSA and DRE tests were often not very clear and doctors were not sure if you had prostate cancer or not. Before the new MRI test was developed, too many men unfortunately got treated for prostate cancer when they did not need it. Cancer treatment is high-powered medicine; “cut ’em, burn ’em, poison ’em,” as the cancer doctors say – you can cut the tumors out, you can burn them out with radiation, or you can kill the cancer cells with deadly poisons. And cancer treatments have lots of bad side-effects: like incontinence (can’t control your pee) and erectile dysfunction (can’t get it up). In the past, because the tests were not very good, about half of all men who were treated for prostate cancer should not have treated. For these men, their treatment was expensive, a lot of trouble, and the treatment was worse than the disease—it caused more harm than good. But the good news is that all that has changed: there are good accurate tests available now. So, talk to your doctor, get a PSA test if you are over 45 and have a family member who had prostate cancer, and if your PSA score is high, be sure to get a follow-up MRI test before starting treatment.
Be a part of MOCHA. Together, we can eliminate health disparities and improve the quality of life for African-Americans living in Springfield, Massachusetts and all across the country.
