African-Americans experience longer delays between diagnosis and treatment of prostate cancer
To see if there is a difference in the time from cancer diagnosis to initiation of treatment for African American men compared with Caucasian men with prostate cancer, Ronald Chen, MD, MPH, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his colleagues analyzed data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER)-Medicare registry, which links cancer diagnosis data to a master file of Medicare records. Their analysis included 2,506 African American and 21,454 Caucasian patients diagnosed with early (non-metastatic) prostate cancer from 2004 to 2007 and treated within 12 months of diagnosis…