Men diagnosed with early-onset prostate cancer (at age 55 or younger) are more likely to die sooner if they’re Black, don’t have health insurance, and live in lower-income areas with high levels of people who didn’t finish high school.
That’s the finding fromn the first study to investigate how socioeconomic status (SES) affects survival in early-onset prostate cancer. The researchers analyzed the medical records and residential zip codes of more than 112,000 men diagnosed between 2004 and 2018.
Lower-SES individuals may be limited in their ability to find, understand, or use health-related information, and therefore “might not know what advanced prostate cancer feels like, or when it’s time to go to a doctor,” said the first author of the research.
- See “Young men with prostate cancer: Socioeconomic factors affect lifespan” by Charlie Schmidt on the Harvard Health website (June 12, 2023)
- See the full text of the scientific paper “The impact of socioeconomic status on the survival of men with early-onset prostate cancer” by Carlos Riveros et al.
