Most of the time, Black men present with later-stage and more aggressive diseases. Researchers thought Black men had innate biology that made prostate cancer more aggressive than white men. Much of the research literature says risk factors for prostate cancer include the Black race. We have to think about this before we start promoting that being Black means you’re going to form this aggressive prostate cancer.
Race is a social construct to separate people. But the vast majority of our genomes, our genes, are identical. We haven’t found anything specific that we could point to and say, aha, that’s why black men for more aggressive prostate cancer.
It’s time for us to start doing the heavy lifting. To look underneath the hood, so to speak, at all the different reasons like food insecurity, living in violent neighborhoods, and poverty – these environmental exposures can impact someone’s health.
