Medical mistrust is one reason why African American patients are more likely to have regrets about their choice of treatment for prostate cancer, suggests a study of 1,112 men treated for localized prostate cancer between 2010 and 2016. About 40 percent of the patients eere African American.
Because their cancer hasn’t spread beyond the prostate gland, patients with localized disease have a choice of treatment options, including active surveillance, hormone therapy, radiation, surgery, or watchful waiting.
African American patients were more than twice as likely to have high decision regret regarding their prostate cancer treatment. Medical mistrust and concerns about masculinity explained some of the effect of race on regret scores. African American patients were also more likely to feel that screening and treatment for prostate cancer “made them feel like less of a man.”
Regardless of race, poorer sexual function and worse urinary incontinence – two major side effects of prostate cancer treatment – also predicted higher decision regret scores.
- See “For African American men with prostate cancer, decision regret linked to medical mistrust” by Wolters Kluwer Health on the NewsWise website (November 24, 2020)
- See the abstract of the scientific paper “Race, Decisional Regret and Prostate Cancer Beliefs: Identifying Targets to Reduce Racial Disparities in Prostate Cancer” by Molly E. DeWitt-Foy et al.
