Black People More Affected by Pancreatic Cancer than Whites
Smoking and body mass index represent high risk factors connected to pancreatic cancer. It has been observed that black people are more affected by this disease than white people and thus, experience a higher mortality rate. Researchers recognize that they “still have a long way to go towards understanding pancreatic cancer disparities.”
Lauren Arnold associate researcher in the department of surgery from Washington University in St. Louis explained:”Reducing overweight/obesity and smoking will help reduce pancreatic cancer overall, as well as prevent other diseases.” The study undergone by her team appeared in a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research called Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
The pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of cancers and represents a great challenge for the scientists that try to acquire more knowledge about it and also cure this aggressive illness. The majority of people whom suffer from this disease die in a two year`s time because the symptoms of this type of cancer are usually noticeable when the cancer has already spread in the whole organism. Moreover, there are too few tests that can discover the pancreatic tumors.
According to statistics, this aggressive form of cancer causes more deaths in Afro-American people than in white persons. The mortality in the case of black people was higher with 32 percents since 2001 up to 2005. The data was disclosed by National Cancer Institute statistics.
The team of researchers led by Lauren Arnold utilized information from CPS-II (Cancer Prevention Study II) in order to discover the similarities and differences about how pancreatic cancer affects black and white people. They separated the risk factors specific for the examined samples and using the prior study observed the marks of the risk factors that made them affect the two samples in different ways. By doing this, researchers wanted to explain the manner in which the pancreatic cancer appears and evolves in both cases. Every person who took part in the study had to give some personal information like: race, medical history and health behavior. With this information, the scientists consulted the Cancer Prevention Study II in order to evaluate the results.
The outcomes of the study were somehow known. Smoking proved to be the highest factor of risk in triggering pancreatic cancer, no matter the ethnicity. Additionally, body mass index also increased the chance of suffering from this type of cancer. However, the scholar found out that black people encountered a 42% higher risk of dying from pancreatic cancer than white people. Nonetheless, even if the scientists eliminated the other hazards that cause pancreatic cancer, they could not form a conclusion. As Lauren Arnold Explains: “We hoped to find that by accounting for known and suspected pancreatic cancer risk factors, such as smoking, diabetes and BMI, and by looking at this in the context of race and gender, we’d be able to explain the higher rates of pancreatic cancer in blacks. Unfortunately, we were unable to explain these differences.”
Team member Maria Elena Martinez who is the director of the Cancer Health Disparities Institute at the Arizona Cancer Center stated that even though they managed to find some risk related differences between the two races, on the whole, they were not able to observe the how they affected the varying mortality between ethnicities. She stated: “The results most certainly point to the need for additional work to explain these racial disparities in risk of pancreatic cancer. Factors other than those assessed by the researchers may be responsible for the disparities. These can include unidentified lifestyle and/or environmental factors, genetic factors or unique gene-environment interactions.”
The thing which differentiates this study from others done in this matter is the fact that a huge number of persons who took part in it were not suffering from pancreatic cancer. The researchers tried to observe what factors trigger the pancreatic cancer to appear and evolve, so they focused more on what was the risk of getting this type of cancer. Moreover, the study is concerned with the long-run.
Researcher Lauren Arnold said that one of the problems with the study were related to the biased results because people who develop pancreatic cancer may do so due to poor living conditions or limited health care. Nonetheless, prior research presented that poor health care does not necessary trigger the most cancer death rates in Afro-Americans. Moreover, this type of cancer is detected in late development periods and this is why it is so hard to combat, triggering a high mortality rate. Regarding this, scientist Arnold stated: “Our data do not explain what is causing these disparities, but we hope it encourages researchers to continue looking for reasons why blacks develop and die from pancreatic cancer at higher rates than whites. Clinicians who have patients with a family history of pancreatic cancer or other risk factors for the disease should communicate the benefits of losing weight and quitting smoking, if anything, to help reduce their risk of pancreatic cancer.”
