Race Does Not Alter Cure Rates for Prostate Cancer Patients

Race is not an independent predictor of whether a patient with clinically localized prostate cancer will be cured using permanent radioactive implants, according to a new study published in the June 2002 issue of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology and Physics, the official journal of the Washington, D.C.-based American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology.

In the study, researchers compared the biochemical freedom from recurrence rates between African American and white American males treated with permanent prostate brachytherapy.

Between September 1992 and September 1999, 1,089 patients, including 246 African Americans, underwent permanent prostate brachytherapy alone or in combination with external beam radiation therapy. To study whether race affected the outcome of the treatment, researchers performed Cox regression analysis and found that race was not an independent factor in predicting treatment failure.

Using a computer-generated matching of the entire patient cohort, two identical groups of white Americans and African Americans were compared to further identify whether a difference based on race could be determined. This matched pair analysis controlled for the use of neoadjuvant androgen ablation, the pretreatment prostate specific antigen levels and Gleason scores in each subset. Once again, no difference in biochemical freedom from recurrence could be ascertained between the white American and African American cohorts at five years.

"While this paper does not address differences in the incidence of prostate cancer in the African American and white American community, the results indicate that when prognostic factors are evenly matched, race is not an independent factor in predicting biochemical freedom from disease following permanent prostate brachytherapy," said Louis Potters, M.D., Clinical Director, Radiation Oncology, Memorial Sloan-Kettering at Mercy Medical Center in New York and lead author of the study. "After reviewing the data, we found that 84 percent of the African American patients remained disease free after five years compared to 81 percent of white Americans, without any significant difference between the two groups."

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The International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology and Physics is the official journal of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology. ASTRO is the largest radiation oncology society in the world, with 7,000 members who specialize in treating patients with radiation therapies. As a leading organization in radiation oncology, biology and physics, the society's goals are to advance the scientific base of radiation therapy and to extend the benefits of radiation therapy to those with cancer and other diseases.