Black/White prostate cancer disparities

[Darryl]

youtu.be/JaCUluoWK1w(Not working as expected?) Prostate Cancer kills Black men at 2.4 times the rate as it kills white men in the USA. Dr. Nyame shares his thoughts about healthcare and prostate cancer disparities in America. Dr. Nyame is a surgeon, researcher, educator, and patient advocate who specializes in urologic oncology and general urology. youtu.be/JaCUluoWK1w(Not working as expected?)

[ellie2211]

Might be a number of factors affecting treatment and preventative screening..... (Black brown, asian, indigenous, etc)

Cost, lower quality insurance coverage, flexibility at work (sick days), education, misinformation etc

Very sad

[Howard53545]

There is a historic aversion to medical visits due to issues like the Tuskegee experiment.

[PeteLG]

Darryl,Thank you for this educational interview with Dr. Nyame. I passed it on to some of my Afro-American friends. Here in SC we live in the prostrate cancer hot zone. Senator Hollings, RIP, acquired funding for the MUSC to help address this plague among black men.

Hilton Head SC had rich prominent person establish an outreach to black men in churches and civic organizations, we had a urologist helping too, but he took a job at NYU and outreach ended. He believed in Cryosurgery for medically compromised patients.

What many men have: an advocate, adequate insurance, access to family history in my experience fewer black men do. Trust of "medicine" all to often goes back to the injustice spread year after year at the "Waffle House" over coffee.

At one church I was giving a presentation, an older woman told me her husband was filleted (radical), cooked (radiated) then poisoned (ADT) then after a million dollars of medical bills died of a heart attack. That story lives in the collected memory of the black male population and those who love them.

PeteG

[noahware]

Interesting that there was no mention of differential roles of vitamin D in this conversation. Recent talk about this includes that: "in African American men, vitamin D receptor controls more genes and different genes than it does in white men. In particular, vitamin D receptor seems to regulate genes associated with inflammation and with sleep patterns (circadian rhythm) in African American men.

"Prostate cancer in African American men seems to weaken vitamin D receptor’s ability to bind to cells. So the protein regulates fewer genes in the prostate tumors of African American men than in the healthy prostate cells of African American men. But, it still regulates some 600 genes in African American men’s prostate cancer compared to none in white men’s prostate tumors."

survivornet.com/articles/th...

And: "We propose that the molecular response of prostate tissues to low vitamin D status leads to increased intracellular import of not only vitamin D, but also androgens. Megalin is the endocytic membrane receptor that imports globulin-bound vitamin D and androgens. We observed that in AA men only, the expression of prostatic megalin increased with vitamin D deficiency and increased with the percentage of West African Ancestry.

"We propose that long term vitamin D deficiency in AA men leads to a compensatory increase in megalin to maintain tissue levels when the serum is deficient. In turn, high megalin would also import more androgens, thus driving hormonal carcinogenesis. Hypothesis: Low vitamin D status in African American men drives increased androgen import into the prostate via the membrane endocytic receptor megalin. "

grantome.com/grant/NIH/R21-...