Age-specific racial disparities in the incidence of fatal prostate cancer: an analytic deconstruction

Black men in the United States bear a disproportionate share of the prostate cancer (PCa) burden, with more than 50% higher incidence and double the mortality compared with White men. Previous studies have examined racial disparities in the incidence of fatal PCa (fPCa), defined as diagnosis leading to disease-specific death within 10 years, and found that they are greater in younger vs older men. However, the extent to which these trends are driven by disparities in incidence or survival is unknown.

We conduct a retrospective analysis of data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program over the period 1980-2009 to decompose the incidence of fPCa into incidence and 10-year probability of death and quantify the relative disparities in these metrics by age at diagnosis.

We find that relative PCa incidence for Black vs White men significantly decreases by 0.116 units with each successive 5-year age group (95% CI = -0.183 to -0.049) but the relative probability of death within 10 years does not differ significantly by age (slope = -0.012, 95% CI = -0.060 to 0.035). Further, this deconstruction is similar before and after the introduction of prostate-specific antigen screening.

We conclude that higher relative incidence of fPCa in young Black men vs young White men appears to be largely driven by their significantly increased incidence of disease. This finding supports investigating targeted screening of Black men beginning at younger ages than White men.