“The bottom line, in a sense, is that African American men with advanced prostate cancer need to get to an oncologist and ideally need to get on a clinical trial, and if they do, their outcomes are every bit as good as Caucasian men, if not even a little bit better,” Richard Schilsky, MD, chief medical officer of ASCO, said at a briefing prior to presentation of the studies.
Neil Osterweil/MDedge News
Dr. Daniel George
In the second study, a prospective clinical trial of abiraterone (Zytiga) in 100 men with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), black men were more likely to have a decline in prostate-specific antigen (PSA), and a longer median time to PSA rise than white men (16.6 vs. 11.5 months), reported Daniel George, MD, also from Duke.
“There’s a 1.6 times greater likelihood that African Americans are diagnosed with prostate cancer, but a 2.4 times greater chance they die from that disease, and although there very well may be multi-factorial reasons for that, I think some of this is genetic,” he said.