Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
Doctors should bring up PSA testing early with men who are more likely to get prostate cancer—like Black men or those with a family history—instead of waiting for the patient to ask.
Descriptive
In Africa, many cancer-risk genes are old and have been around for a long time; outside Africa, many of those genes changed into a safer version, which is why non-African populations have lower risk.
Just a few gene variants are responsible for most of the higher prostate cancer risk in men of African descent—removing these few variants makes the risk gap between populations disappear.
Quantitative
When early humans left Africa, they took only a small group of genes with them—this accidentally left behind many prostate cancer risk genes, making non-African populations less genetically prone to the disease.
Mechanistic
Some genes that raise prostate cancer risk became common in certain populations not because they helped with cancer, but because they were stuck next to genes that helped people adapt to sunlight—like lighter skin in Europe.
Men whose ancestors came from West Africa are more likely to have genetic traits that raise their chance of getting prostate cancer than men from East Asia, because of ancient human migrations and natural selection.
In places where fewer early cancers are found, death rates are lower — which doesn’t make sense unless many cancers are never counted at all.
Correlational
Prostate cancer is the #1 cancer diagnosis and killer for Black men in the U.S. and Caribbean — more than any other cancer.
Even though fewer African men are diagnosed with prostate cancer, a much higher percentage of them die from it — meaning many cases are never caught in time.
We don’t yet know if screening men with BRCA mutations for prostate cancer actually saves lives or improves how they feel long-term.
Countries that spend more on healthcare and have more doctors tend to find more small, early prostate cancers — probably because they do more testing.
Standard PSA tests or MRI scans aren’t good enough on their own to find dangerous prostate cancers in men with BRCA mutations—they need better ways to tell who’s really at risk.
When Black men in Africa are diagnosed with prostate cancer, their tumors are usually much bigger and more dangerous-looking under the microscope than when Black men in the U.S. are diagnosed.
Having a BRCA1 mutation raises prostate cancer risk, but not as much as having a BRCA2 mutation.
Black men in the U.S. get diagnosed with prostate cancer more often than Black men in Africa or the Caribbean, but that might be because doctors in the U.S. test for it more.
When men with BRCA2 mutations get prostate cancer, it’s often more aggressive and shows up earlier in life than in men without the mutation.
Men who inherit a faulty BRCA2 gene are 2 to 4 times more likely to get prostate cancer than men without it.
If people think only men with peeing problems get prostate cancer, then healthy-seeming men won’t get checked—and that’s dangerous because cancer can be silent.
Most people think if you don’t have trouble peeing, you don’t have prostate cancer—but that’s wrong; most early cancers cause no symptoms at all.
A normal PSA reading can be misleading if your prostate is small—doctors do better at spotting cancer by comparing PSA to prostate size.
Prostate cancer grows on the outside of the prostate, while urinary problems come from swelling in the middle—so one doesn’t cause the other.
Men who wait until they have trouble peeing to get checked for prostate cancer are much more likely to find out their cancer is already spread, compared to men who get tested even if they feel fine.
Most early prostate cancers don’t cause any urinary problems—so if a man has trouble peeing, it’s probably not cancer, and if he has no symptoms at all, he could still have cancer.
After removing the tumors, the man’s urinary problems didn’t get worse, and a year later, the tumors hadn’t come back.