NEW YORK, Oct. 5 /PRNewswire/ — According to a report from San
Francisco General Hospital, low-income men are more likely to have
advanced prostate cancer compared
to their financially secure peers. “As of right now, the reason
behind this statistic is not because of a lack of access to quality
medical care since many of the study’s patients had had routine prostate
cancer screening,” said Dr. David Samadi, Chief of Robotics and
Minimally Invasive Surgery at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New
York City, a urologic oncologist specializing in
prostate cancer treatment and robotic
surgery using the da Vinci surgical system.
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Racial differences in the low-income group do not account for
the disparity, despite the fact that the hospital had a large
percentage of African-Americans in their study group.
African-American men are typically at a higher risk of prostate
cancer than other racial groups. Researchers of the study from this
publicly funded “safety net” hospital, which sees mostly low-income
and uninsured patients, believes many factors are contributing to
the elevated number of high-risk prostate cancer cases. Risk
factors such as obesity, diet or environmental issues might also be
playing a part even though science has not completely determined a
true link between these issues and prostate cancer. “What is at
work here is some unidentified genetic factor that is affecting
prostate cancer progression in this specific group,” said Dr.
Sam
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