http://health.yahoo.com/news/178320
Most Asian Men Have Better Prostate Cancer Survival Rates

August 13, 2007 08:40:40 PM PST
By Steven Reinberg HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, Aug. 13 (HealthDay News) -- Your prognosis for surviving prostate
cancer may depend on your racial and ethnic background, a new study
suggests.

Asian men have better survival rates than white males, while South Asians
have the worst survival rates, according to results of a study of men
living in California.

"Nearly all Asians do far better when they get prostate cancer," said
study lead author Dr. Anthony Robbins, of the California Cancer Registry
in Sacramento. "But Indian men didn't do as well as other Asian men, and
they did worse than all other men, including blacks and whites," he added.

The reasons for these racial and ethnic differences in prostate cancer
survival aren't known, Robbins said, adding, "We just couldn't explain
it."

Not only couldn't the researchers explain the finding, they were left with
an apparent paradox. The Asian men were usually older and had more
advanced disease at the time of diagnosis, Robbins said. "Based on their
risk factors, you would think they were going to do worse," he said.

In the study, Robbins and his colleagues collected data on 116,916 men
(108,076 whites and 8,840 Asians from the six largest represented Asian
ethnicities -- Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and
Vietnamese) diagnosed with prostate cancer. The researchers compared
prognostic factors and survival rates among the men.

The researchers found that for Asians, risk profiles were worse compared
with whites. For example, Asians were more likely to have more advanced
disease and use non-curative therapies. But, for Asians -- except for
South Asians -- survival rates were equal to or better than rates for
whites.

Japanese-American men were 34 percent less likely to die from prostate
cancer compared with whites. But South Asian men -- those from India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan -- were 40 percent more
likely to die from the disease, Robbins said.

The study was published online Monday in the journal Cancer.

Some of the factors that may influence the findings include diet, exercise
and genetics, Robbins speculated.

"Doctors that are seeing patients for prostate cancer need to be aware
that these differences can be used as factors in planning the patient's
treatment and telling the patient what their survival might be," Robbins
said.

Dr. Durado Brooks, director of prostate and colorectal cancer at the
American Cancer Society, thinks this study demonstrates the need to better
understand how different racial and ethnic groups respond to diseases.

"This study points out the potential misleading conclusions we can come to
when we use these large groups to lump different subpopulations into," he
said.

"If you lump in the South Asian subgroup with other Asians, as is
traditionally done, you totally miss the fact that these folks have a
strikingly higher chance of dying from prostate cancer," Brooks said.

Brooks said the study finding can provide a basis for research to try to
understand why these differences exist between populations.

Prostate cancer is the most common type of cancer to strike American men,
other than skin cancer, according to the American Cancer Society, which
estimates there will be about 218,890 new cases of prostate cancer in the
United States in 2007, and about 27,050 men will die of the disease.
Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in males.
While one in six men will get prostate cancer during his lifetime, only
one man in 34 will die of the disease. The death rate for prostate cancer
is declining, due in large part to earlier diagnoses, the society said.