Sexual orientation plays role in prostate cancer prevention

I’m not sure why this was studied, but the results are interesting. Apparently if you’re an African-American male who is gay or bisexual, you’re in a group of men that is least likely to go for prostate cancer screening. This finding was published in the recent issue of Medical Care.

Researchers used information gleaned from almost 20,000 telephone interviews with men who participated in a project called the California Interview Survey. While the findings didn’t find a difference between PSA testing (prostate specific antigen) between the orientation of men in general, when the groups were broken down according to race, African-American men showed a big difference between heterosexuals and those who were either gay or bisexual.

African-Americans who were not heterosexual had a 12 to 40% lower rate of going for PSA testing than heterosexual African-American men. This number was even higher when compared to non-heterosexual whites, where African-American men who weren’t heterosexual had a 15 to 28 percent lower rate than their white counterparts.

It’s likely that this finding explains why African-American men, as a group, are diagnosed with prostate cancer later than their peers of other races and they also have a higher death rate from the disease.

You can read  more about the study in this press release, Gay and bisexual African-American men have the lowest use of prostate testing.

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Tags: cancer blog, prostate cancer, gay African-Americans, bisexual African American men,  PSA, prostate specific antigen