Movember 2023: Racial Gap in Prostate Cancer Mortality
Good news -- narrowing the gap, but still a ways to go!
First, let’s get the Movember fundraiser links!
Movember Fundraiser
Here are the places you can donate to the Movember Foundation, which supports men’s health, specifically focusing on prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and men’s mental health:
Mary Pat Campbell’s MoSpace – a place to donate at Movember itself
My Movember Facebook fundraiser – my officially linked fundraiser, if this works better for you
And here’s a QR code if that works better for you:
Racial gaps in prostate cancer mortality, U.S.
If we graph prostate cancer age-adjusted death rates by race/ethnicity, there is a large gap between black men and other groups.
There are groups in the data other than the five I graphed, but these are the major ones (White = non-Hispanic White, for what it’s worth. In general, if not mentioned, I am using the non-Hispanic statistics for groups when not noted.)
In last year’s post on the racial gap in prostate cancer mortality, I mainly talked about how that affected apparent geographic patterns in prostate cancer mortality.
Today, I want to focus solely on how prostate cancer death rates have changed for black men over the years I have data for.
Focus on Black Men: Prostate Cancer Death Rates for 1968-2022
Here is the high-level trajectory.
This is similar in the age structure we saw for the population as a whole:
The main differences are the much higher level of death rates, as well as higher volatility in results (because there is a lower population on which the results are based).
Decade-by-decade improvements
Let’s look at how those rates have improved now.
That is looking really good for improvement, but also noticing where a lot of the prostate cancer gap seems to be arising from: the oldest black men. The age 85+ category seems to have the worst results and the biggest disparities.
Let’s compare this to the overall population.
Notice there are very different vertical scales being shown.
Preceding 1992, the age 85+ death rate trajectory got much worse much more rapidly for black men than for the population as a whole.
Since then, that age group has seen a lot of improvement.
While the overall population saw a stalling of improvement for 2012-2022, black men continued to see improvement over most age groups.
So that’s good news, but there remains a large mortality gap.
Spreadsheet
Fundraiser progress
I’m sitting at $1,140 as of the morning of 17 November 2023 — thanks so much to all my donors!
I see discrepancies like this all the time. As I see it, there two interpretations of the gaps in black/white mortality:
1) African-Americans tend to make poor lifestyle choices and collectively have much higher rates of violence and poverty, of course they have poor health outcomes. Duh.
2) African Americans are stupid little children who cannot be responsible for their own lives, victimized by evil people on all sides, we must save them from everything by making sure they can't buy i.e. menthol cigarettes, even when they murder each other at 14x the rate of all others in America that's not their fault don't punish them. High rates of prostate cancer must be due to "racism", blah blah Tuskeege (which 90% of black people have never heard of). See: "Stupid little children".
I'm not trying to be offensive, this crap diminishes the dignity of everybody around it, black people, white people, doctors, even honest people like yourself reporting the truth. People with money to be made seize on any gap in health outcomes as deliberate racist action and ignore both structural differences in lifestyle but also real broad-based improvements that are helping all.
I would love to see it fade away in my lifetime.